How did you learn to improvise?

[solspirit]

Ya'll are whack

 

[Phantasmagoria]

Selfless eh?


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Yep, like Gandhi..

 

[Demanic]

Well, bless your heart.

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[Seashore]

Here is an excellent description of Indian improvisation that translates nicely to other styles and forms. This guy explains the improvisation process of an Alap very poetically and romantically. This also translated to call and response in a blues, jazz, or rock setting. Once again this speaks to the communication going on during an ensemble improve through music more than visual cues.

Here is a very nice example of an Alap.

At 4:17 some of the greatest call and response improv of all time.

Thanks for posting this stuff. My drummer is really into Debashish Bhattacharya but I'm sorry to say I've been giving his music a miss for years, until I clicked on that first link. I was raised with a bunch of pretty boring and repetitive Indian music around the house and the sound of it usually makes me grind my teeth. But man, what a great player. I gotta watch the rest of these.

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I don't feel like I have any special insight to add here. I enjoy improvising leads but it's not a real strength. I started playing more or less seriously about 30 years ago and had about a year's worth of lessons with a blues-rock player, who taught me a handful of licks in A minor and just had us trade off solos over 12 bar blues. So that's how I started improvising leads. Around the same time I got one of those Casio sampling keyboards, and I would use the record function to loop chord progressions with basic drumbeats and play leads over that for hours. My parents deserve sainthood.

When I see phrases like "coming up with my own stuff", I think about songwriting. Solos felt like an obligatory part of songwriting when I started off, so I tried to figure out how to play them to a certain extent, but in my later teens I started listening to a bunch of bands that didn't bother with solos, and soloing became a sort of side project of dabbling in wankery for fun. It didn't meet up again with what I considered the "real" parts of my playing until I started trying to play better leads a few years ago. But riffing and songwriting has its heart in improvisation for me. I love playing freely and coming up with something unexpected that feels like it's worth pursuing and refining. Really miss doing that with other people, it feels sterile when I just play by myself anymore.

Big sources of inspiration for me have been in prog rock, medieval polyphony, a little bit of classical, Eastern European choral folk stuff, and lately (finally) jazz and fusion. When I was living in NYC I would also sometimes get ideas from the noises of the city, power tools at my jobs, etc. Whatever I can find to help me get out of whatever box I happen to find myself in at the moment. It all winds up becoming metal music, so I guess it just gets crammed into another box at that point. As much as I enjoy improvising, the songs always wind up being tightly scripted and performances boil down to the challenge of getting everything right.