Me-“So in an average day, how much time do you spend actually improvising on the saxophone?”<\/em><\/p>\n Student-“Ummmmm……. I never thought about that before………Honestly, not much. \u00a0If any, maybe 5 minutes at the most……….”<\/em><\/p>\n It’s no exaggeration when I say 90% of my adult students give an answer similar to the answers above. \u00a0Do you see what the issue is here? The #1\u00a0thing students want to be good at is improvisation but the one thing they spend the least amount of time doing…….improvising!<\/p>\n Now, when I\u00a0talk more about this with the student, I find that I\u00a0get many similar responses:<\/p>\n If you want to get better at improvising you have to spend a good deal of your practice time improvising. \u00a0I can honestly say that 90% of my practice everyday is spent improvising. \u00a0I put on a play along, funk grooves, the radio or just play acapella\u00a0and just use whatever concept I am working on while improvising. \u00a0This morning, \u00a0I was working on a \u00a0chromatic pattern trying to get my technique smooth and after 10 minutes thought “Let me try this with some music and see how it sounds. \u00a0Let’s see if I can get into the idea and out of it smoothly.” \u00a0I put on a random funk groove in B minor and then spent the next 45 minutes jammin’ over that groove. \u00a0What started out as a technical exercise was now being used in a musical setting. \u00a0Not only that, but I was coming up with hundreds of different ways to use the pattern over that B minor groove. \u00a0I was coming up with different rhythms, different combinations of the notes, different directions of the pattern, different intervallic combinations (instead of just chromatic I started trying to do it in whole tones, minor thirds, circle of 5ths, etc…….I felt great by the end!<\/p>\n Why did I feel great? \u00a0Well think about it, instead of just practicing my chromatic pattern up and down the horn with a metronome I was flexing all my musical muscles while playing it to that groove. \u00a0I was working on:<\/p>\n All these things are pulled into the equation when you are practicing improvisation.<\/p>\n So, although it might sound like a straight forward common sense \u00a0idea, I have found that the majority of students out there are not dedicating the time they should to actually improvising. \u00a0I think there can me many reason why and you have to do some contemplating yourself to figure out your reason or reasons. \u00a0One possibility is that\u00a0many of these students find that practicing patterns from a book, or etudes, or classical studies, or charts, or scales is easy or shall I say “less taxing”. \u00a0Many of them are good at these things and many times while doing something we are good at we “feel” good about ourselves. \u00a0So human nature will tend to pull us towards those things that might make us feel good…….<\/p>\n I\u00a0understand the feelings of \u00a0“this is hard”, “I’m not creative”, “I don’t know what to play”,\u00a0“Everything I play sounds awful” ,”I stink”. \u00a0We have all had those thoughts and feelings. \u00a0People (who don’t play music) always tell me “You are so talented and gifted! \u00a0I wish I could have your ability to make stuff up on the spot like you do” but the truth is that I wasn’t born with this talent. I remember years and years of frustration where I couldn’t come up with stuff to play. \u00a0How did I overcome those thoughts and feelings. \u00a0I improvised! \u00a0I spent hours everyday playing with records. \u00a0Sometimes trying to copy the person on the record, other times just going nuts and trying my own ideas. The process went something like this:<\/p>\n and so on, you see where I am going with this. The abilty to improvise is built through repetition, experimentation and just doing it as Nike says……..<\/p>\n\n
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