How do you practice improvising?
It’s jazz week here at tonebase trumpet.
For those of you who practice improvising, what do you work on? How do you do it? What backing tracks do you use (or do you forgo them altogether?) and what are some of your favorite tunes to practice? Let’s recommend ideas and strategies for one another!
If you’re interested in learning to improvise, but perhaps still a bit unsure or nervous at how to start, I recommend you check out Stuart Mack’s Jazz Fundamentals course. If you know a bit and are interested in taking things to the next live, check out Ralph Alessi’s course Practicing Improvisation!
I’m also giving a live stream today (Monday, June 3rd) at 11 AM PST on Mastering Your Chord-Scale Relationships! If you can’t view it live, you can watch the reply on the tonebase website. There will be a HUGE PDF and specific practice exercises for thinking about chords and scales.
Until then, happy practicing!
3 replies
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I'll kick off the discussion!
For me, it's varied a lot depending on where I was in my development. During my high school and undergraduate years, I was working on just improvisation 1-2 hours every day. I'd play my scales across all registers and keys (major, melodic minor, altered dominant, diminished) and in various patterns. I'd work on simple progressions (ii-Vs at various tempos), and usually play a few choruses of a blues or rhythm changes in a hard key to warm up. Then I'd tackle my transcription of the moment (I did several albums' worth of Freddie Hubbard, and plenty of Miles, Chet, Lee, Clifford, Dizzy, and then branched off into one-offs from players who I thought sounded cool).
At that point I'd work on tunes, learning or memorizing melodies, and would play them as expressively as I could. ESPECIALLY ballads!
I'd end by working on harder chord progressions that were giving me trouble, and slow them way way down, getting used to the chord-scales and trying to connect things. I'd try to apply a purely musical concept to the tune, and give myself constraints/parameters to force me to be creative with less.
Most days I wouldn't be able to get to EVERYTHING on this list, but I'd try to balance things out over several days whenever feasible.
During my master's degree and beyond, I've had a lot less time. So I've focused on improvising freely when I have time. I'll transcribe and learn tunes on occasion, but generally I like to just pick up the horn and BLOW, over a drone or a drum track.
Anyone else have any other ideas/processes that have worked well for them?
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Everything you mentioned is important but I think transcribing solos is the most important and the thing I do least of due to time constraints. I'd be interested to hear from you and others what are the top 10 or top 5 trumpet solos to transcibe or learn. and why.