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Saturday, December 9, 2017

Beginning to improvise

As a follow up post to my last one (where I segued into the challenges of improvisation) I thought I'd write a short post on - wait for it - how to get started on improvising!  This is something I'd like to be able to do - I still go to guitar jams/singalongs and there is always that break when people with mad skills are able to effortlessly improvise over the chords we are playing.  Not to mention it's a component of the certificate course I'm planning to take next June.   I'm still in the dark about how to get to the right notes before they actually happen, despite having been through some of the instructions on improvisation on classicalguitarcorner.com.  It's just not sinking in.  So I thought I'd branch out into the acoustic world (where improvisation is all part of the genre) to see if there was another way I could approach it.   I came across a site I thought I'd share - it looks promising - using the scale seems to make sense, and the fact that the same 4 chords are repeated throughout the song means there is no guessing game to figure out which chord you're moving to.  (That's another thing I'm having trouble with - I can tell there's a chord change but more often than not don't know which one - but that challenge is for another time).  I also like the incremental approach - starting off with one octave, known chords...  apart from getting seriously bored with Beyonce I think it might have promise, so I thought I'd share - here is a link to part one, and from there, go on to part 2 😊...
https://www.musical-u.com/learn/learn-to-play-by-ear-using-chord-tones-part-one/