The Basics Of Improvising

Improvisation is probably the best part about music that I enjoy as a guitarist.

It combines your knowledge, spontaneity and your understanding of how to generate a feeling into a piece of music.

Whether that be with a cool new lick you just learned , a rhythmic phrase or a new scale you want to push over the track you are playing on.

Its where I feel the music is the most alive due to needing to show someone thinking on their feet and demonstrating how they feel in the moment.

You have a limited window to decorate a small bit of time with your musical knowledge.

I think improvisation has a few aspects that can be taught and understood such as the right idea behind it, the concept of call and response and more importantly your own vocabulary.

These topics will be touched on later in the article:

• Approaching Improvisation

• Your Vocabulary

• Phrasing Call and Response

So for now lets talk about how to approach improvisation.

Approaching Improvisation

When approaching improvisation we need to understand what it is so we can get into the mindset of working with it and moulding it into something tangible.

Improvising can mean anything goes but its more of finding a way to make something work within the context of whats happening around you.

We can always look at how improv classes handle things with their approach of yes and. which is the idea that we should respond to the surrounding context and add to it.

In this case the context is the music that is happening behind you and your adding to is is knowing the correct framework with scales and guitar techniques to enhance something that’s already there. which brings me onto the next topic.

Your Vocabulary

You are only as strong as how deep your vocabulary is on the guitar. Vocab being all of the scales, licks and repertoire you know, that you can bust out in a split second’s notice when it is your time to shine when improvising.

The more you know the more interesting your improvisations will be. Lets assume you know the 5 pentatonic shapes as demonstrated in these diagrams

Because of this assumption that you should know these shapes you can use this as the framework for your improvisation.  

Before we go onto phrasing and using these scales we first need to understand the context of the music we are improvising over.

for our example we are going to take a blues chord progression a 1 4 5 in the key of A minor.

Its important to match scales that will work over the chords in the background or you are not respecting the context of the music.

Later with more advanced understanding you can start playing outside of the context and resolving it back into the music.

But this involves having that basis of understanding that I don’t expect you to have right at this moment.

best not to worry your cotton socks about it and move onto the next section!

Phrasing Call And Response 

As mentioned before improvisation is a combination of your vocabulary and your knowledge of techniques and contextual understanding of music.

One of the key improvisational techniques known by most good improvisers is call and response.

What is call and response?

Where does it come from?

In modern music it can be linked back to blues music as there is a tradition of playing a phrase and then answering that phrase with a longer motif.

You could also argue that bird song has an element of call and response to it too, one bird makes a long sweet song and another answers it.

So its defiantly in nature too.

The idea behind call and response is to have one phrase you would like to make in this instance we are going to use the above example of the minor pentatonic over the 1 4 5 in a minor.

We will be using the most typical scale shape from the 5th fret of the Low E string and I will improvise a phrase by adding rhtymic elements and a duration that seems aqeduate.

We now have our call which is our first phrase and you can think of this like a musical question or a starting statement.

When a call has been made what follows is an answer to the call, or a response.

Typically a response is roughly the same length as the question maybe a bit longer to satisfy the call duration.

here is what the response sounds like to the previous call:

Now lets hear them one after the other:

Improvisation can be a series of calls and responses  with the golden rule above of the longer the call the longer the response, here is an example of what that sounds like with the calls and responses getting longer over time.

So to summarise, improvisation can be learnt to an extent it’s a combination of rhythmic groupings, knowledge, understanding musical context and phrasing with call and response.

I hope this video has helped with understanding an inroad to improvisation let us know if its helped you in the comments, and if you want more free videos on the topics of guitar and music theory considering subscribing as you have made it this far you might as well!

See you in the next article!