Musical Improvisation

Well today I am gonna teach you a musical concept called improvisation which is a technique most commonly  used in Jazz and New Orleans derived styles. In its simplest form, improvisation is simply spontaneous, musical creation. That means you play by your soul, making some notes longer while keeping others shorter. There are rhythmic surprises when you improvise over a track.

Let’s take Hello by Adele and try to improvise over first few sections of it. First listen to the tune several times carefully and hone your ears with the tune. I am not going to give you any sheet music for this. To improvise firstly we need to know the key that we are in. The tune which we are going to consider is originally in the key of Fmin.  







The key tells you what notes belong together, where you can reach out to for extra notes, and how to keep your improvisation moving. You can pretty much make use of only those notes, and you'd probably sound pretty okay with them.

Now check out the chords in this key and their relationship functions. I have listed them below.
  • i chord – F minor, F minor seventh (Fmin, Fmin7)
  • iidim chord – G diminished, G minor seventh flat five (Gdim, Gm7b5)
  • III chord – Ab major, Ab major seventh (Abmaj, Abmaj7)
  • iv chord – Bb minor, Bb minor seventh (Bbmin, Bbmin7)
  • v chord – C minor, C minor seventh (Cmin, Cmin7)
  • VI chord – Db major, Db major seventh (Dbmaj, Dbmaj7)
  • VII chord – Eb major, Eb dominant seventh (Ebmaj, Eb7)

Now try to choose four chords out of the above listed chords and try to improvise the chord progression. Try to play by your ear and soul. If it sounds good, it is good. Then try to add bass notes to the chords using the notes in the key of Fmin. 

Once you are done with all of these, try to transpose the tune into a different key and improvise it all the way through using the same chord functions and relationships which you used above. Also take a note that A♭major is the relative major of the key of Fmin.

I hope you learned something out of this. Improvisation is a huge topic which is hard to discuss in a shorter blog like this. However I strongly believe that this would be a good starting point for you. Keep improvising. Happy Playing.


References
[2] http://www.piano-keyboard-guide.com/key-of-f-minor.html



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