Ravindra Ranwala's Musical Ideas

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 t

Today let’s take a look at a scale often used in improvising on the Blues form, the Blues scale. Here is the C Blues scale going up and down one octave. The Blues scale is pretty much similar to the minor pentatonic scale where we have two minor 3rd intervals, one at the beginning of the scale and another towards the end of it. So Get the C minor pentatonic scale, and add the flatted fifth which is G♭ to that. Then you get the C Blues scale. The more colorful notes of the Blues scale are sometimes referred to as Blue notes. They are the minor 3rd, flatted 5th and the minor 7th. So when you are playing in the Blues scale, those are the notes that you probably most often emphasize.  Play the C Blues scale one octave and then for two octaves by eighth notes and explore the shapes underneath your fingers. When you hear some blues tune, try to find the key that is in and improvise it all the way through using the notes in that Blues scale.

In this blog post I am planning to walk you through some important finger warmup exercises with a new way to practice scales. We gonna use an F major scale and we gonna practice it in quarter notes, eighths and triplets using the same metronome marking. The quarters for one octave, the eighths for two octaves and triplets for three octaves. We’ll set our metronome to 80 beats per minute. Below I have given both treble and bass clef staves for the key of F. Start with quarter notes one octave on an F major scale in your right hand. Now play it in eighth notes for two octaves. Now play it in triplets for three octaves. The point is to start with quarters then go to eighths and into triplets using the same metronome marking. Now try it in your left hand. Start with quarter notes for one octave. Then go to eighth notes for two octaves. We won’t go for triplets in left hand for now. Now try to put the hands together which is bit tricky since we have to play different