Category Archives: Practicing Improvisation

Practicing Improvisation: Two Essential Components To Develop For You To Improve

Develop This Important Problem Solving Skill For Continuous Improvement

One of the things that keeps many musicians from improving, is not being able to simplify complex (or difficult) pedagogical challenges. I’m talking specifically here about how these challenges are approached in the practice room.

As I improve as a musician, I notice that I also broaden my skills in breaking large (sometimes seemingly impossible) tasks into smaller, more doable parts. This has been fundamental in helping me to approach and manage technical (and other musical) issues with confidence and clarity.

In exercise science, the act of modifying a particular exercise (making it easier) to suit the limitations of the person performing it, is called regression. Just about any exercise can be regressed: less resistance (lighter weight), slower pace, movement modification, longer rest interval, greater mechanical advantage, etc. This principle of regression makes virtually any any physical activity or exercise approachable, no matter the person’s fitness level.

The same idea applies to practicing music.

Part of my job as a practice coach for musicians is to teach my clients how to regress (simplify) their challenges. This gives them a valuable tool to approach virtually any musical task.

For you to continually progress, you need to be able to meet ever increasing challenges in the practice room. And to do that, you absolutely must learn the art and science of regression. In essence, you must learn how to simplify a musical task to make it approachable for you at your current skill level.

To regress effectively, you need to be:

Persistent-Completely committed to the task, and willing to work until you’ve mastered it.
Patient-Putting no time constraints on yourself; allowing as many practice sessions as necessary in order to master whichever step you’re working on.
Humble-Always accepting where you are in your abilities. You must also be willing and able to stop, reassess, simplify and redirect your efforts.
Kind-To yourself. Keeping positive, constructive thoughts.
Insightful-Becoming an expert on how you learn.
Creative-Always finding new ways to break things down into smaller and simpler parts.
Organized-Aiming your regressed efforts towards natural, logical progression (and keeping track of your work).
Self-aware-Staying easy, relaxed, breathing, and in balance as you practice.

No matter how difficult a particular challenge may seem, your job is to break it down into pieces that are easy enough for you to handle immediately. Your aim is to give yourself a starting point, a way to get (and stay) engaged in the process of learning. Then you master each component one small step at a time.

There are endless ways to regress challenging musical tasks. Here are but a few things to think about to do so:

Tempo-If the exercise (etude, passage, etc.) is challenging you because of tempo, find a tempo that is manageable for you. Stay with that until you’re ready and confident to move on to the next manageable tempo. Use a metronome to stay steady and track your progress.
Rhythm-If reading a complex rhythm seems daunting, take time to do the math to figure out exactly how much value each note gets. Count it out several times. Then rewrite (or rethink) the passage in longer, but equal, rhythmic values. For example, if you’re struggling with a passage that has lots of tied sixteenth and thirty-second notes, spend some time understanding and counting (aloud) the relative value of each note, then rewrite the passage in quarter notes and eighth notes of proportionate time values. If that’s still too difficult play, write it out again in half notes and quarter notes. Once you understand the math, and feel the relative time values of each note, you’ll be surprised at how easy and simple the original rhythmic passage becomes.
Rest-If you can’t make it through an exercise or piece in its entirety (perhaps because of endurance and/or mental focus issues), consider breaking it down into very small parts with brief (but mindfully placed) rests in between. As you develop endurance and focus, you can start eliminating the rests one at a time until you can manage the whole thing.
Range-If an exercise or passage is just way out of your range (but still possible on your instrument), consider transposing it to a playable range (but at the extreme ends of your actual ability). Spend lots of time with it in this range (I’m talking days or weeks), then gradually modulate in half steps toward the target range, spending lots of time on each modulation until you’ve reached your goal. (Persistence is key here!)
Information-If you feel overwhelmed with memorizing an entire piece, or are intimidated by learning a particular pattern in all twelve keys (I’m thinking of jazz musicians here), take one small segment (or one key) and really get to know it well. Play this segment to the point where you’re almost bored and truly hungry to learn more, then take another small bite, and so on. Before you know it, you’ll have it all under your fingers.
Visualization-If an exercise, piece, task, etc., seems so intimidating that you don’t know where to start, start by thinking about it without your instrument. Learn to hear it if you can (maybe get a recording?) Vividly imagine yourself playing it as you look at the music, listen to the recording, think about the chord changes, count out the rhythms, etc. Even practice singing it. All this kind of visualization work engages you in the process of learning, and studies have shown that those who practice this way gain measurable improvements. This is often the first step in the journey that will take you to your goal.

Again, your aim should be to find a starting point, and stay engaged in the process of gaining proficiency. Ask yourself, “What would I have to do to give myself some kind of experience with this exercise (piece, etude, chord changes, pattern, etc)?” “How would I have to modify this exercise to be able to play it right now?”

No matter how small something is, it can be made smaller. Any task can be made simpler, if you use your imagination.

Anything you can do to keep yourself involved in the process (even if it’s simply visualizing or listening, or singing) is going to lead you in the right direction. Use your curiosity and passion as fuel, and you’ll improve.

Some of the most proficient musicians I know, are so (in part), because of their ability to approach challenges in this way. To them, nothing is impossible. Develop this problem solving skill, and nothing will be impossible for you, either.

Refresh Your Thinking To Greatly Improve The Efficiency Of Your Practice

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The quality of your practice is directly proportionate to the quality of your thinking. Contrary to what many musicians believe, you’re not “training muscles” as you practice, so much as you are directing your thinking so that your brain can readily coordinate the muscular activity necessary to play well.

Mindless, repetitive practice usually yields limited, often disappointing results. Deep practice, where you are cognizant of your specific, in-the-moment goals, as well as what you hear, and sense in yourself as you play, is what leads to consistent improvement.

If you practice when you are distracted (maybe you didn’t get enough sleep, are in an angry mood, worried, about something, really hungry, etc.), you know that you won’t do very well. In fact, you might even finish your practice session with the feeling that you wasted your time.

But what about when you’re fully present and focused for your practice session? Are there ever times when you need to check your thinking? My answer is a resounding yes!

The more efficient I become in my practice routine, the more I realize how important it is to refresh my thinking frequently. This calls upon my willingness to stop what I’m doing. To take the saxophone out of my mouth and regroup, so to speak. Not always an easy thing to to when I’m in practice mode. If I play a particular passage less than ideally, I want to jump right back in and get it “right”, without any thought about what I need to do to “get it right”.

But I’ve learned that stopping to check in with, and redirect my thinking is always a better choice than plunging forward again with another mindless, misdirected effort. It always makes the next attempt so much more efficient and constructive. So I’ve gotten pretty good at stopping.

After I’ve stopped, I usually refresh my thinking by asking myself a few simple questions:

Am I tightening my neck, shoulders and back?
Am I allowing the weight of my body to balance through my feet (when I stand as I practice)?
Am I mostly expanding or contracting (releasing or tensing)?
How is my breathing (effortless and quiet, or tense and noisy)?
Am I really listening to what I’m playing (as opposed to just hearing sounds)?
Am I clear about what my immediate goal is with this particular exercise, passage, etc?

I pause to ask myself these questions dozens and dozens of time as I practice. Then I return to my full stature (my full length and width), finding all the space in my body again, and recharging my senses. I return to the physical and mental conditions that I need to play my best.

I’ve gotten so good at it that I can make these assessments rather quickly, then get right back to playing my instrument. For me it’s almost like I’m pushing a “reset” button for my brain, or refreshing the screen of my computer. Everything seems to flow and fall back into place when I do this.

If you wanted to simplify it all, you could ask yourself, “Am I tending more toward contraction or expansion as I play?” Included in this question (besides noticing your body) is your ability to listen to and hear yourself. Are your senses going inward (contracting), excluding the full experience of your sound, or expanding outward into the room where your sound actually is?

If you ever feel yourself becoming frustrated and/or fatigued as you dig deep into your practice, consider this idea of stopping and refreshing your thinking. Taking time to pause and redirect your thoughts is never a waste of time when you practice. Never. You’ll find (as I and my students have) that by stopping briefly to refresh, you’ll return to the task of practice with greater focus and clarity. You’ll make fewer mistakes (which means you’ll spend less time making unsuccessful “takes” of whatever you’re working on). In short, you’ll get more done in less time. Really.

Plus, you’ll develop a good standard for awareness that you’ll bring into your performances. All good news.

And if you’d like to stop and take a slightly longer moment to refresh your thinking, you might want to think to yourself the Alexander Technique directions:

I allow my neck to be free, so that my head releases upwards on top of my spine, (I don’t tense my neck and jaw, jamming my head downwards into my torso)

so that entire torso can lengthen and widen, (I don’t tense my shoulders, back and ribcage)

so that my knees can release forward and away, (I don’t tighten my pelvis to draw my legs up tightly into my hip joints; I don’t lock my knees.)

so that my heels can release into the ground. (I don’t tense my feet and ankles, so that I allow the weight of my body to go through my feet)

These directions are a good description of what happens as you release tension and expand back to your full stature. If you practice using them consistently, you’ll get consistently good results (both I and my students have).

But whether you use these directions, or ask yourself the kinds of questions that I’ve listed above, or simply remind yourself to pause for a moment to regain your stature and your clarity, make a point of stopping to refresh your thinking.

Make it an aim as you practice, and acknowledge and reward yourself with encouragement when you’ve succeeded in doing so. Ask yourself, “How many times was I able to stop and redirect my efforts in the 15 minutes I’ve spent working on this particular exercise?” Notice that when you do this, you play with much less tension, and greater clarity and consistency. Make this a part of your practice habits, and you’ll be pleased with the results.

A Simple Way To Open Up Your Rhythmic Imagination

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The art of musical improvisation involves imagination and ability: An unfettered muse supported by the specific skills necessary to turn creative impulses into clearly expressed ideas. It is the discipline of musical composition carried out moment to moment. In real time.

Because of the “real time” demands of improvisation, it’s natural for our brains to find patterns to rely upon to simplify the task. This is both good and bad. Good because it leads to connectivity, cogency, fluidity. Bad because it can also lead to us getting stuck playing many of the same things the same way over and over again.

As I listen to many jazz improvisation students, I’m many times struck by the lack of rhythmic imagination in their improvisation. In jazz pedagogy there is, in my opinion, too often an over emphasis on pitch studies (harmony, scales, passing tones, tensions, resolutions, etc.) at the expense of rhythmic studies.

Don’t get me wrong. I think it is absolutely essential to gain control over this vast amount of tonal material in order to improvise deeply, effectively and personally in the realm of modern jazz. (Lots to practice!)

Yet it is the energy of movement that turns pitch choices into music. That’s where time and rhythm come in. But too often I hear jazz improvisers playing the same rhythmic patterns, the same predictable accents, with far too much of an cadential emphasis on the form of the song they’re improvising over.

When I give a first lesson to a student of improvisation, I’m listening for many things, trying to get an idea of where they’re at with their skill and conception. Whenever I hear a student that can play with a considerable amount of fluency (holds the song form and makes the changes with relative ease), but a rather limited rhythmic conception, I always ask how he or she practices the materials of the music (scales, arpeggios, intervals and other patterns).

What I usually observe as the student plays through scale, arpeggio and other exercise patterns is far too much respect to a “4/4” kind of symmetry. Everything fits nicely into the bars and ends on the downbeat. For example, secondary triads in major keys (C major here as an example) might be played as follows:

As you can see, there is a metric grouping of 4 notes emphasized by virtue of the tonal pattern. (I use accent marks here to outline the rhythmic subdivisions). There’s nothing wrong with practicing this pattern in this manner, but you must realize if you (or my student) were to do so exclusively (or even primarily), you’d be seriously limiting how you might use this intervallic movement in your improvising. Lots of emphasis on the downbeats, and lots of emphasis on the “box” of the four bar pattern.

In essence, you’d be depriving yourself the opportunity to develop your rhythmic imagination and control to its fullest. No matter how much harmonic material you get under your fingers and into your ears, you’d be missing out on so many movement possibilities.

So a very simple thing you can do in your practice to open up your rhythmic imagination is to avoid putting all your scale, arpeggio and interval patterns in these neat little boxes.

Here are three techniques you could employ to make the pattern from above a bit more interesting and challenging while still maintaining the continuity of the line:

1. Rhythmic displacement-You can move the starting note of the pattern to different places in the bar. Here are two examples:

In the first example I displace the pattern by one half beat by starting on the upbeat of one. This kind of playing “turns the time around” so that the downbeat sounds like the upbeat. The second example has the pattern displaced by one full beat. You could go on and displace the pattern on each part of all four beats, learning to feel the movement of the pattern from many different angles.

2. Polymetric modulation-By slightly modifying the notes in the pattern you can imply different meters. (I’ve used accents to clarify.) Here is a 3/8 over 4/4 pattern:

I’ve modified the pattern above by simply omitting the fourth note (the repeated 3rd of the triad) of each group.

Below is a 5/8 over 4/4 pattern which I create by adding a fifth note to each previous group of four notes (the root of each triad):

And here’s a 7/8 over 4/4 pattern (accents on groups of 4 and 3). This pattern is a bit more complex, but easy to understand. I simply remove the fourth note (again, the repeated 3rd of the triad) from every other previous group of four notes.:

(If you’d like to explore polymetric modulation and rhythmic displacement in a thorough, methodical way, please consider my eBooks, Essential Polymeter Studies in 4/4 for the Improvising Musician, and Rhythmic Dissonance.)

3. Rhythmic modulation-By placing a 4-note grouping in the pulse of a triplet, you can create an interesting kind of rhythmic tension:

You could also use the same kind of metric modulation to with the other modified patterns from above. There are many, many ways to vary this simple triad pattern.

And I haven’t even touched upon the possibility of adding more variety by combining rhythms (mixing eighth notes with quarters, sixteenths, using ties, rests, etc; that’s a topic for another article). As I mentioned earlier, I wanted to show you here how to play patterns with a continuous pulse.

So try some of these technique next time you practice your scales, arpeggios and intervals. (If you like to play licks and other patterns you’ve learned from transcribing solos, you could also practice them in this more rhythmically multi-dimensional way.)

Of course, you should always use a metronome to check your accuracy and control. Practice each pattern with the metronome clicking on each beat, and with the click only on beats 2 and 4 (backbeat swing feel).

And if you’d like to approach these kinds of variations and explorations in time, rhythm and meter in a more methodical, challenging and comprehensive way, you might consider my e-book, entitled Rhythmic Dissonance.

Make it your mission to find new ways to work out your melodic material in a less predictable way as you expand your tonal language.

Having the ability to call upon these rhythmic devices and learning how to “land on your feet” (always knowing where you are in the bar) will vastly improve your spontaneity and control as you improvise. If you make this a regular part of your practice you’ll really surprise yourself with how you can think and move in new ways. Imagination supported by skill.

Here’s a video performance of the late, great, Warne Marsh playing Body and Soul. Listen to how he floats and subtly shifts the cadences of the song and beautifully creates and resolves rhythmic tension against the steady pulse provided by the rest of the band. A master at work. Enjoy:

Want To Increase The Duration And Intensity Of Your Practice? Think Like An Athlete

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So you’re inspired to take your practice to a new level of commitment. You’re ready to spend the time and the energy. Ready to become more focused and disciplined. That’s great! Riding that wave of enthusiasm is going to take you into a deeper realm of self-expression (and satisfaction).

I’d like to offer an idea that might help you make that transition in your practice time more effective: Think like an athlete. After all, athletes and musicians have something in common. Both spend lots of time practicing precise, repetitive movements.

Many years ago I became deeply involved in endurance sports (cycling and triathlon, in particular). Any wise endurance athlete knows that training has to be done in cycles. You simply can’t train hard all year long (potentially injurious and counterproductive). You need a program that includes carefully planned work at different levels of intensity and duration, as well as plenty of strategically applied rest.

Competitive endurance athletes often plan their training in yearly cycles (including several shorter cycles nested within the year), with specific goals about when to be in peak condition for particular events. At the end of every competitive season comes the “off-season”, which is essentially a carefully prescribed period of rest.

This rest season is absolutely essential to the continued success of the athlete. It promotes mental and physical recovery, as well as providing an important period of reflection about the effectiveness of the training efforts of the previous season.

After this rest period, the athlete begins to train again. And the smart athletes realize that they need to scale back their efforts considerably from where they were at the end of the previous season.

They can’t just start hitting it hard, no matter how enthusiastic they are. (This is true even if the athlete has maintained a reasonable amount of fitness throughout the off season by means of less intense, yet regular physical exercise and activity.)

And the same is true for musicians. Even if you’ve been practicing regularly (let’s say, for example, an hour a day) and you want to significantly increase your practice time, you’re best off by doing it gradually.

One of the best pieces of advice given to me by an excellent cycling coach some years back, has also helped me in my practice as a musician. He said to attain the optimum results when increasing my training efforts, I should always aim for “teasing myself” into better condition.

In other words, each training session should leave me feeling like I want to do a bit more, go a little further. And then the next day, I dig a little deeper, but still “teasing” myself into condition. Still hungry and curious for more.

As you might guess by now, this approach to physical fitness training has helped me significantly as I apply it to increasing my musical practice efforts.

Many of the musicians that come to me for Alexander Technique lessons do so because of chronic pain and/or injury they’re experiencing as they play music. There are several causes of their pain: excessive tension, misdirected muscular energy, distorted posture, to name but a few. Often these problems are exacerbated by practicing “too hard”.

So besides teaching these musicians how to play with far less effort and tension, part of my job is to teach them how to safely build their practice intensity back up. I show them how to “tease themselves” into better condition.

Here are some things you can do to help you safely and effectively increase the intensity and duration of your practice:

Stop before you get tired. Don’t bring yourself to exhaustion during any point in your practice session. Even though you’re working hard, aim for feeling energized as you finish. A “good kind of tired”, instead of a complete wreck.

Improve your awareness as you practice to notice where and how you might be working too hard. In particular, notice your neck, shoulders, back and legs. Think release and mobility instead of tension and holding.

Notice your mental states. Are you able to bring 100% of your attention to the act of practicing? Are you thinking clearly each time you start a new phrase (or attack a note)? Do you feel “foggy” or fatigued during any point of your practice session?

Recognize intensity. Not all practice is equal. One hour of long tones in the upper register of a brass instrument is far more taxing than 2 hours of easy, melodic etudes in the lower and middle register. So don’t just think practice time, weigh in intensity as well. Be willing to make a shorter session if it has more intense work in it.

Become disciplined about time. Work in pre-specified amounts of time. Avoid going from practicing one hour a day to 3 hours in one session. Spend a few weeks building up to this duration.

Become disciplined about stopping. I rarely practice anything for more than 15-20 minutes without putting my saxophone down and walking away from my practice area, even if just for a couple of minutes. If you get in the habit of doing this, you’ll avoid a significant amount of accumulated fatigue (both physical and mental). Also, give yourself permission to stop at any moment you feel like you’re straining or misdirecting your efforts. Mastering the art of stopping is essential to your safety and your improvement.

Become disciplined about resting. This goes hand in hand with stopping. Rest many times during a practice session, turning a one hour period into 4 short practice periods with a few minutes of rest between each. Then give yourself a good 5-10 minute rest at the end of the hour. Lying in constructive rest is a great way to recharge your batteries at the end of each practice hour. Take a day off each week from practicing.

Think in training cycles. Just like the endurance athlete, modulate your training efforts. Have some easier days, some more intense days. Also consider easier weeks, and more intense weeks.

Make your aim to finish each session wanting more. This brings us full circle to my first bulleted point above. Put your instrument away with a sense of curiosity, a sense of longing to explore more, to go deeper. At first this might seem unsatisfying (or even frustrating), but as you gain control over your ability to stop, your ability to rest, your ability to manage your time effectively, you’ll find a deep sense of accomplishment and confidence in your practice efforts (not to mention you’ll really improve your playing!)

The similarities between the musician and the athlete are many, and I’m certainly not the first to have drawn these comparisons. By thinking more like an athlete, you’ll change your practice in a positive, progressive and sustainable way.