An Intellectual Framework for Improvising

A student of mine who has been playing guitar for many years before coming to me for lessons has brought to my attention an issue which I have always understood but never consciously acknowledged or had a need to articulate. This is literally how we think about what we’re doing on the guitar. Do we think of our fingers, of the notes, of sounds?

The lowest level of improvisation and musicianship, in my opinion, is finger-focused. In other words, the musician’s relationship with the instrument is very visual, and whether conscious or not, his understanding of what he is doing is very much about shapes. This musician can only play in exact fingerings and executing exact patterns which he has already practiced extensively. This is something we all need to do, so again I stress the word “only”. You can tell who these people are by asking them to play a passage and then repeat the same passage not even in a different area of the guitar, but even with a different fingering. They simply can’t do it. This is because their understanding of their actions is limited to the physical activity they execute with their hands. For them technique is not a means to an ends, but the experience itself of music making.

The next level of improvisation and musicianship, in my opinion, is someone who is conscious of the notes beneath their fingers and their corresponding sounds, but who focuses on technical virtuosity, requiring them to often be stuck in repetitive patterns. Their interaction with music is deeper than the first group of people, but their ability to interact meaningfully with other musicians is limited by their lack of control and ability to both listen and react to others.

The next level of improvisation and musicianship, in my opinion, is someone who can find a genuine balance between static virtuosity and listening/reacting to others in a controlled fashion. The problem with these musicians is that they do not practice enough. This lack of preparation forces them to place an unbalanced amount of concentration on their own actions rather than an equal amount of concentration on their sound as well as the sound of the other people they make music with. Not that they aren’t listening, but they could be listening better if they weren’t struggling to remember what to do as it was happening.

The highest level of improvisation and musicianship, in my opinion, is someone who has the technical freedom to create truly spontaneous music. While I’ve already spent time explaining that we can never create a new scale or chord shape on the fly but only rearrange preexisting patterns, these musicians derive their spontaneity from their ability to respond with a high degree of versatility, sensitivity, and freedom to the actions of the other musicians they play with. Because they are extremely well prepared to play, their reaction time is minimal and they have more awareness as to what other people are playing.

It should be noted that somewhere along the line we all probably oscillate between any and all of these descriptions, perhaps even within the same night or even within the same song.

I would also like to note that I’m fully aware of how subjective, personal and arbitrary this is and how everybody has the right to prescribe their own set of criteria and standards when evaluating a person’s competency.

I would also like to note that my degrees are ranked in order of expressiveness as I see it, with the person not who can play the fastest or anything like that, but the person who is most capable of freely expressing themselves on their instrument at the top. It is not the amount of material we are able to digest or the speed at which we can regurgitate it, but the meaning and emotionality of how it is implemented as well as our consciousness of what everybody else is doing.

I would also like to note that this scale refers to musicianship and improvisation. It would be silly to take what I’m saying out of that context. A singer-songwriter may only play five or six chords, may have no real understanding of harmony or the guitar, but this is not an essential skill for their mode of expression. Simply put, their skill as a musician is a secondary concern. They may not be very good musicians, and they may note have a clue how to improvise, but this is not the means they have chosen to convey their emotions and is an irrelevant criteria for judging their artistic merit.

Finally, I would like to note that among the two “highest” levels their is an ability to think of all the available notes in a scale when creating melodies, and to have the technical freedom to play any notes in any order they can think of and, tempo permitting (the faster the tempo the more linear any new idea will be), have the technical freedom to create spontaneously and play the new melody.

For instance, why practice playing a scale in series of intervals or triads or four note chords or any other pattern (some of which I have spent much time discussing)? Is it to play those patterns at wickedly fast speeds and wow people with your technical virtuosity? Or is it so that no matter where you are on the fretboard, and no matter what finger you are playing whichever note with, if the next note you want is a 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, or anything else away, your fingers are prepared to play that note with a seemingly instant reflex? Not that there isn’t a time and place for mechanical and “prerecorded” sequences at high velocities. They are useful for creating transitional and exciting material. But is it more (or at the very least equally) about systematically playing through all the possibilities of which music can be made up?

Think of chemical and physical description of the world. The periodic table has 117 elements, but all these elements can be described as combination of protons, neutrons and electrons. And even these protons and neutrons can be broken up into smaller components. So all the known matter and physical events which take place in the universe can be reduced to the interactive relationships between a handful of forces on a handful of particles.

Music can be thought of in a similar light, so to speak. By taking our instruments and practicing musical material on them, not by practicing licks, but by practicing the very building blocks of all music, from serial music to Gregorian chant (intervals), we can react in the most free way possible.

DISCLAIMER: Principles of this article might seem to contradict in spirit the previous article. If spontaneity is an illusion, why then spend so much time talking about levels of spontaneity and the various degrees to which it can be achieved? Well, let’s think about it. If you play every interval possible on a guitar from every note to every other note, than no melody from that point on could ever be considered truly spontaneous because it is made up of tiny elements all of which you have already experienced. Furthermore if you take steps to consciously try not to spew out long and repetitive strings or sequences of these limited number of elements (much like DNA), than you are making fresher music. Certain small patterns of strings constantly reappear (arpeggios for instance) and this cannot be helped, but there are random mutations and variations that can also take place.