Hi everyone,
I've been teaching about ten years..... I have a young guy who wants to learn how to play lead really well and how to improvise.... however - he doesn't want to learn other people's songs and licks. He knows pentatonic scales and all the different patterns that go with that - (the five shapes) - but when he improvises it just sounds like he is going up and down the scale - I told him that - and he agreed. I then said you should learn other people's licks so that you can use what they do and change it to become part of what you want it to sound like. He is very much resisting the idea of learning licks, but it feels like he is trying to miss out a step to my mind anyway. Learning other peoples licks and seeing how they work is a good building block to then become better at making your own ...... all those people like Jimmy Page - Clapton all copied off old records and Blackmore even goes as far to say - "The only way you can get good, unless you're a genius, is to copy. That's the best thing. Just steal"
So am I wrong in the way I want to teach him this? Or is there another way to get him to play as he wants to - which is weirdly enough like me! He said he wanted to sound like me.
I feel it is just poor judgement on his part, if I wanted to write a book, surely I would read one first (or many) to see how it is done. So if you want to be a great lead guitarist, surely you try what others have done first to give you a feel and eventually create your own style, yes?
together we stand, divided we fall..........
Yes, there's another way.
The whole idea of learning to improvise through learning licks is to build a vocabulary - getting to know what sounds work well together, and which work over certain chords and chord changes. You can do that by copying someone else, or by building your own.
The trouble with learning from licks is that you're using someone else's phrases. "Once upon a time" or "It was a dark and stormy night" were original openings to stories... once. Now they're cliches. And lots of soloists are just stringing together cliches - they don't have their own voice.
The trouble with doing it yourself is that you have a blank canvas - all these notes to combine in different ways. It's sort of like finding a dictionary and trying to use it to create literature. You might accidentally write Hamlet. Odds are you won't. Odds are better that you'll write Hamlet if you read Shakespeare. But if you want to be Jack Kerouac, Shakespeare may not be the right path.
Teaching someone to improvise without learning licks is actually the approach I prefer. It's the longer path in some ways, but it generates creativity, and focuses more attention on ear training.
My general approach to this for beginners has three basic parts, but they're not done sequentially. The teacher has to have good ears, and the ability to communicate what choices worked and why, and suggest alternatives for what didn't; the teacher also has to think a lot about what a student's natural strengths and weaknesses are, and devise specific lesson plans.
1. Restrict, restrict, restrict. Let the student pick three or four notes in sequence from a scale. Play a chorus using ONLY those notes. My improv teacher in college made me do five choruses on ONE note to see what I could do rhythmically. Or dictate the rhythm - do a chorus with all eighths... no rests, no sixteenths, no swinging. Or choruses with only chord tones. These exercises will help the student really get to know what can be done with the musical material. They also introduce frustration... finish with free soloing. The results are often night and day once the restrictions are released.
2. Focus awareness on the chord changes. Many improvisers can't tell you what the chord of the moment is. No matter how good they might seem, they'd be better if they had this awareness - melody and harmony must work together. Drill on landing on specific chord tones at each chord change - start with roots, because they're easiest. Then do fifths, then thirds and any other tones.
3. Force thinking out of the box. Dictate the first interval, and make it rough - a b5 or a b9. Coach ways to resolve this dissonance (study composition techniques if you don't know). Get the student to build a theme based off that interval. The intervals should be things you notice the student never does, and they can be as simple as dictating beginning with an arpeggio if everything they do is scalar.
As the student advances, shift the focus to larger picture stuff.
1. Building phrases.
2. Using compositional techniques, like sequences, to create longer phrases from short ones.
3. Focus on the overall form, creating and releasing tension to give a shape to the whole thing.
It takes a lot of focus on the part of the teacher to teach improv 'from scratch'. Your ears and your short term memory must be good, and you have to have complete focus. It's a lot easier to teach riffs, which is why so many people take that approach. But teaching students how to be creative is very rewarding.
Guitar teacher offering lessons in Plainfield IL
My general approach to this for beginners has three basic parts, but they're not done sequentially. The teacher has to have good ears, and the ability to communicate what choices worked and why, and suggest alternatives for what didn't; the teacher also has to think a lot about what a student's natural strengths and weaknesses are, and devise specific lesson plans.
1. Restrict, restrict, restrict. Let the student pick three or four notes in sequence from a scale. Play a chorus using ONLY those notes. My improv teacher in college made me do five choruses on ONE note to see what I could do rhythmically. Or dictate the rhythm - do a chorus with all eighths... no rests, no sixteenths, no swinging. Or choruses with only chord tones. These exercises will help the student really get to know what can be done with the musical material. They also introduce frustration... finish with free soloing. The results are often night and day once the restrictions are released.
2. Focus awareness on the chord changes. Many improvisers can't tell you what the chord of the moment is. No matter how good they might seem, they'd be better if they had this awareness - melody and harmony must work together. Drill on landing on specific chord tones at each chord change - start with roots, because they're easiest. Then do fifths, then thirds and any other tones.
3. Force thinking out of the box. Dictate the first interval, and make it rough - a b5 or a b9. Coach ways to resolve this dissonance (study composition techniques if you don't know). Get the student to build a theme based off that interval. The intervals should be things you notice the student never does, and they can be as simple as dictating beginning with an arpeggio if everything they do is scalar.
As the student advances, shift the focus to larger picture stuff.
1. Building phrases.
2. Using compositional techniques, like sequences, to create longer phrases from short ones.
3. Focus on the overall form, creating and releasing tension to give a shape to the whole thing.
It takes a lot of focus on the part of the teacher to teach improv 'from scratch'. Your ears and your short term memory must be good, and you have to have complete focus. It's a lot easier to teach riffs, which is why so many people take that approach. But teaching students how to be creative is very rewarding.
1. So those melodies/licks you create are with no rests etc.. just all quavers in a row? Just want to understand that, that sounds as if it would be very boring rhythmically - but maybe that's the point? I was also trying restricting him to only four notes and I let him do any rhythmic ideas he wanted..... he made it very very busy and I told him that - and that he should try keep it simple first.
2. Chord change awareness - I think I might be one of those people who doesn't focus/always know what chords are beneath me I am afraid. I guess that means I can't teach that? I could work out the chords that happen though.
3. I am also a little bit lost on this one, what should I study is there a guitar noise lesson? I mean I think I could hear the resolve of dissonance and maybe I understand this more than I think but I am not sure.
together we stand, divided we fall..........
It's kind of hard to boil everything down to a checklist, or a "do this-then that" approach, because everyone has their own natural strengths and weaknesses. This is especially true when you're being creative.
The creativity itself is never wrong. As soon as a student plays a note, they've improvised. As soon as they play a second note, they've created a melody. So I always try to encourage what they did right before looking at what needs improvement.
Music is a language, and as with any other language, some folks are naturally eloquent. Other folks aren't. I'm constantly making that comparison, but only because I've found it the most effective analogy for teaching (and learning) music. Think about how we learn language - after we've gotten a few words under our belt and made a simple sentence, our second sentence isn't a change of topic - it's a variation on form. "Want that" becomes "Want this", and then "Want food"... "I want food"... "Do you want food?" We learn to speak by taking what we already do and varying it.
We don't start doing that by mixing up twelve words (the number of notes in each pentatonic fingering) - we start with two or three. We say our few words and STOP, creating a phrase. Playing A-C-D sounds different from playing A-C-E or A-D-E. We notice the differences, and experiment.
Experiencing music is heavy on short term memory. No single note ever sounds "bad" - they only sound off in context, when we compare the sound to what we just heard. So limit the length of phrases to what the student can remember and assess. When I have a student solo, I'll stop them frequently. I'll play the last phrase they did, and then play it again with a variation that might work better, and explain why.
The key is working with short bits. Music has SO many subtle elements - rhythmic patterns, melodic choices, interval leaps, dynamics, phrasing... focusing on them one by one makes the climb manageable. That's the benefit of restricting the other elements. The point of playing with few notes isn't to make it boring - it's to remove most of the melody and focus on the rhythm. Eliminating rhythm by using a constant pattern like eighth notes focuses on melody.
Do the same thing with chord change awareness. Can't remember the changes? Play ONE note for each measure - the root of the current chord. Then move to a slow melodic rhythm - half notes or quarters - where the student has free choice, but must play the chord root when the chord changes. Initially this develops the ability to keep track of time while you're doing something else (a critical skill); after that it develops the ability to plan ahead, preparing for that next chord change with the melody you're making.
What should you study? EVERYTHING! :)
Most appropriate to improvisation would be ear training and musical form. Be able to identify intervals by ear, and know the fingering variations for each. Know what makes a minuet, and try to play a solo that's a minuet (two distinct phrases played AABB) - do the same with other standard forms. It doesn't matter what style of music you're making - this will help with the big picture of a solo.
As a general rule, beginning improvisers on guitar make two mistakes: they play too many notes, and they play too many scale runs. Force them to make phrases - initially four beats, then THREE - starting on beat 2. You want to develop an awareness of knowing where the downbeat is, and leaving space for the rest of the band, even when you're the one 'out front'. Force a change in direction - no more than four notes in one direction (three is better). If the student makes a leap - skipping over more than one scale tone, as in going from A-E in the Am pentatonic scale - they should follow it with a bit that is a scale run of a couple of notes in the opposite direction. There are tons of small things like this that will make improvised solos sound better quickly, but the key skills for all of them are listening and analyzing. So another great thing you can work on to improve your teaching is transcribing solos (start with just phrases so it's not overwhelming) to develop your ears... then take them apart and see how they work.
None of the ideas I use in teaching improv are original. All of them have come from listening to successful solos, figuring out what they did, and trying to create drills that focus on those specific bits of vocabulary. So your best ultimate source is music itself.
I think that's what holds most people back - because the source is music, they assume you learn by osmosis. And you can - many people do that, just as we learn to talk that way. But great writers also study grammar, or dissect the phrases other writers used. You can always keep progressing along those lines. The key isn't just imitating, but asking why things work - and applying the answers you get to other situations to see if they're techniques you can use.
So seriously, study everything. I've found value in studying anatomy, learning wind instruments and percussion, foreign languages, and literary criticism. Anything you can relate to music in some way helps. To be a good teacher you have to be a perpetual student. It not only keeps you learning and thinking... it also helps you empathize with the process your students are going through.
Guitar teacher offering lessons in Plainfield IL
Many people on the internet post long responses, which often causes skimming but I always read every word of noteboats replies..... really useful responses - I am trying to learn some jazz on the side for myself - I can't even quite comprehend how all the licks are built yet for jazz but I guess that's another story. Maybe I could if I took a bit more time to analyse them ... I have a bit of mysticism towards jazz because it is so unfamiliar to me.
Anyway I will consider and try the things you mentioned in your post and if I am ever in Illinois I will stop for a lesson, however unlikely that is.
together we stand, divided we fall..........
1. Restrict, restrict, restrict. Let the student pick three or four notes in sequence from a scale. Play a chorus using ONLY those notes. My improv teacher in college made me do five choruses on ONE note to see what I could do rhythmically. Or dictate the rhythm - do a chorus with all eighths... no rests, no sixteenths, no swinging. Or choruses with only chord tones. These exercises will help the student really get to know what can be done with the musical material. They also introduce frustration... finish with free soloing. The results are often night and day once the restrictions are released.
This one gets my vote ,but initially I give the student those four notes to play.
Vocalise things - when we speak we use long and short sounds, and so we should do the same when we improvise. A phrase such as "I like to eat sausages and eggs and a coffee and a cake" is a great way of getting someone to play four quarter notes, four 16th notes, one eighth note followed by two 16th notes, then four 16th notes and a quarter note - two bars in all and you can play that using a single note.
"Be good at what you can do" - Fingerbanger"
I have always felt that it is better to do what is beautiful than what is 'right'" - Eliot Fisk
Wedding music and guitar lessons in Essex. Listen at: http://www.rollmopmusic.co.uk
you could show him the songs and licks you rip off.
