Hi this is David Reed from Improvise for Real you're listening to the Musicality
Podcast ever wondered why some people seem to have a gift for music have you
ever wished that you could play by ear sing in tune improvise and jam you're in
the right place time to turn those wishes into reality welcome to the
Musicality Podcast with your host Christopher Sutton
Hi this is Christopher founder of Musical U and welcome to the
Musicality Podcast today I'm excited to welcome onto the show someone I was
particularly hoping to feature as part of improv month
David Reed the creator of Improvise for Real you may have heard of this popular
method for learning to improvise and it's one of the few I feel is totally
aligned with the ear lead approach we recommend at Musical U and which we've
been talking about on this podcast lately in this conversation we talked
about David's own musical beginnings and two big pivotal moments one which let
him finally enjoy the learning process and the other which involved totally
reframing his mindset about how music fit into his life we discussed the
traditional approaches to music education and to learning improvisation
and the limitations these ultimately place on musicians and we talked about
how learning to improvise the right way can be like the difference between
blindly following directions versus using Google Maps to immerse yourself
and explore the world you're navigating enrich clear detail I think this episode
is going to be particularly useful for two groups of people those who are like
I once was feeling like improvisation is kind of a a side topic and one I wasn't
necessarily all that interested in I think you're going to discover you may
have dramatically underestimated how learning to improvise could help you
overall in music and also those who are interested to
improvise and have maybe tried one or two ways before but found themselves a
bit bewildered or disappointed by the experience David does a fantastic job of
describing how learning to improvise should be and have rewarding and
straight-up fun it can be if you approach it in the right way my name is
Christopher Sutton and this is the Musicality Podcast from Musical U
Welcome to the show David thank you for joining us today I thank you very much
it's a pleasure to be here with you so we've had the chance to talk once before
and it was such a pleasure to learn more about Improvise for Real and a bit about
your own musical story but for our listeners who might be new to you and
your project I'd love if you could just share a bit about where it all came from
how did you get started in music yourself well I started pretty young
because my father was a jazz trumpet player and so my first exposure to music
was it was really nice it was both listening to music in the house we were
constantly hearing records by people like Chet Baker and Billie Holiday and
Sonny Rollins but then also there was this social component which to me was
very fascinating because he was going to jam sessions he was playing gigs I would
sometimes be his roadie if I would go help with cables and things like that
and so it was just a very fascinating world that I had the good fortune to get
a glimpse into at a very young age I didn't start playing myself until I was
about nine years old my father gave me a guitar I was a terrible student
I hated practicing mostly because physically it just was very
uncomfortable I had a steel string acoustic guitar and
it was very painful on my fingers and I just didn't have any discipline about it
either and so by five or six years went by that
I was just taking lessons mostly because I was afraid to tell my father that I
didn't want to continue with the lessons but what happens eventually I think is
that even if you're the worst student in the world which I likely was there comes
a point where you've struggled enough with the instrument you've learned
enough that you gained a kind of minimum physical control over it and you reach a
tipping point where the very next exercise or etude that your teacher
gives you you're actually able to play it and experience some of what your
teacher had been wanting to you to experience from the very beginning right
and and so when the pleasure of playing that tune starts to outweigh the pain
involved in producing it suddenly there's no looking back because suddenly
there's no longer it's like the the economics of the situation change and
and from that point forward the same lack of discipline
that made it hard to practice earlier makes it so from this point forward
that's that's practically all you want to do is just keep coming back to this
super fun experience and activity and so that really started in my teenage years
when I was around 14 or 15 from that moment that's when I really found the
pleasure of playing music and and like I say there's no looking back
fantastic that that's such a lovely explanation of the tipping point and how
you know even practice itself can become enjoyable once you get past that initial
struggle right I mean if you think about the way kids get obsessed with video
games you know sports it's fun to learn things it's fun to master things and to
be involved you know with your physical body learning to control things maybe
like this I think but when that's not happening in music it's because
something's missing there's something you're not quite getting and it's up to
us as music teachers to try to help people experience that same excitement
as early as possible in their journey mmm and you mentioned jazz there were
you want a serious jazz guitar curriculum from day one or what kind of
music were you playing no it kind of went it took sort of a circuitous route
I mean I started out learning kind of a traditional sort of folk country method
I don't know if people are familiar with the Mel Bay series of of method books
for guitar so it teaches you the notes on the strings and how to read sheet
music and just very basic music literacy that was the first few years when I was
a teenager part of what made music so exciting to me all of a sudden was that
there was this moment that it dawned on me that this clunky acoustic guitar that
I was holding in my hands was literally the same instrument that these electric
guitar players were playing on MTV right like these rock stars and then suddenly
there was this not only social but artistic components of music that had
just never dawned on I had no idea like where this could lead or what you could
do with music and so that's when I got really excited about rock music I
started buying all the guitar magazines learning to play riffs and songs and
putting bands together in that but I think I was also fortunate to have a
variety of musical experiences like in school I was also singing in the choir
by that point I was playing the trumpet in the school marching band
we had a jazz ensemble I mean these these school artistic programs I think
are so important I don't I think a lot of times we don't realize how important
they can be in the development of people whether they go on to become musicians
or not but I'm very thankful for for those experiences that I had but the
primary one was probably the the rock band at that phase of my life then when
I was about 18 I was very fortunate to get a gig playing in a jazz quintet in a
little restaurant in the small town where I grew up and that was one of the
best learning experiences in my life because for almost two years
we were playing every Friday and Saturday night for four hours and so
that's just a lot of time in front of the real book playing jazz standards
dealing with you know playing with other musicians and I I was very unprepared
for it in the beginning I was and even at the end of it I was still the worst
member of the band but it was you know before that reason it was a very
beautiful and inspiring experience and I think that was really what cemented my
love of jazz music and improvised him because it kind of connected with my
very first experiences as a child listening to those Chet Baker records
and Billie Holiday records in my dad's house and so at that point I really was
able to start working with these beautiful rich sounds of jazz chords and
harmony and all that and and that's what really propelled me for the rest of my
rest of my life really so with it always obvious to you then
that you would go on to have a life in music were you dreaming of being one of
those rock stars on MTV well yeah I certainly dreamed of it but it wasn't
clear at all in fact there was a moment in my late teens when I consciously
decided to stop being a musician I really put the thing down and decided I
was no longer gonna play music and I think that's partly because I didn't see
any path forward you know when you grow up in a small town it's not clear how
you make that change or that jump from the things you can really see in the
physical world and reality to these imaginary things you see on television
of the Red Hot Chili Peppers on some stage in Los Angeles right so there was
that journey that I didn't know how to make but it was combined with the fact
that the way I was playing music the rock music that I was playing which was
mostly imitating they're great guitarists and trying to
learn their solos and things I think it just didn't really satisfy me creatively
I mean it was I I think that I was very much attracted to music but I didn't
know how to find my own way in music and do anything of my own in music and so I
eventually got just so frustrated with it that I just I just quit a quit band
and all that stuff and the interesting thing is that the way I look at it now
is that that's when my true relationship with music actually began because it
gets all the ego stuff out of the way when you no longer think of yourself as
a musician and it's no longer about earning a living or having any kind of
success or being involved in any project suddenly you know you know you're
getting those needs satisfied through other means
maybe you're studying other things you get a job you're doing something else
with your life but then you just have this instrument sitting over there in
the corner with no expectations or ambitions tied to it and so at that
moment the only instrument I really knew how to play well was the guitar and so
this was still the guitar for me at that time but what I would do is I would just
pick up the guitar and start kind of noodling around with them and Annis as
foolish or ironic as it may sound it was in that process of noodling around with
no ambition with no goal that I was finally able to discover what you can
really do with music I was finally able to discover a more genuine relationship
with music that didn't have these ulterior motives attached to it and so
really ironically from the moment I decided to quit music and I wasn't gonna
be a musician anymore that's when things really started to take off and I found
myself playing six or eight hours a day but it was with no concept of self or
any project in life it was just this highly addictive activity that I loved
that sounds like a really great way to kind of rediscover the heart of music
and rediscover that enjoyment I've had the pleasure and the honor of talking to
some great jazz educators on this show before you know we've talked with Steve
Nixon free jazz lessons calm and Nick Mennella of the 10min
jazz lesson podcast and Brent from learn jazz standards and with all of them I
kind of put to them a question that I'd love to ask you which is I think all
three of them kind of went straight to jazz and that can be surprising to some
people because jazz is often seen as this quite advanced complex genre and
you were obviously you said you were gigging a couple times a week playing
jazz standards you've grown up in this jazz household did you find it difficult
to reconcile that with you know just picking up your guitar and playing or
you know how did that work for you because for most people you know to just
pick up and play that's worlds apart from performing as an expert jazz
soloist that's a great question I would love to hear what some of the other
people had to say about it what their experience was my own experience was
that these were very fragmented experiences that had almost no
relationship between them mm-hmm and if there's one piece of that that might be
useful or helpful to to your audience it might be helpful for a lot of people to
understand that what what you see on a stage when you see jazz musicians
performing is not always it can be but it's not always an organic extension of
what you see pop musicians and blues musicians doing in other words those
musicians on the stage doing something that seems very very complex improvising
solos with all kinds of exotic sounds over jazz chord progressions when I was
doing that I at the same time would not have been able to do many of the things
that you teach at musical youth so listen to a simple pop song recognize
the chord changes by ear find the key of the music instantly express myself
effortlessly over that tune a lot of what you described as musicality I
didn't have and what's interesting is that even without that you can still
cobble together a pretty decent solo over a jazz tune if you're just very
diligent and very motivated to learn the theory and scales and the chords and and
I don't mean to say that there was there was no musical intent behind what I was
doing but I was certainly missing a lot of the of the skills that that
Hach all these things together like glue and so I certainly I never played like a
natural I was never one of those you know like full like the total package
musician who can go to a party and you know figure out everything by ear and
plays beautifully I was never that person I just I just had learned to play
solos or end chords over jazz standards before I picked up some of those other
skills so and I think in my case those two worlds really had to remain separate
because I had a lot of catching up to do on the more authentic side before I
would ever be able to get back to the level of complexity that I was playing
from a more theoretical place that's such a valuable point I think you know I
think it would shock a lot of people in the average restaurant to learn that the
jazz pianist and that was entertaining them with this amazing jazz actually
couldn't play a pop song by here and these weren't necessarily related in any
way right and also imagine imagine the suffering of that poor jazz pianist
because you know he's he's doing the best he can and he's on his path and
we're all just at different places and we're learning different things but
because of this misconception all his friends and family are treating him like
the musical genius of the neighborhood and then he goes to somebody's you know
those family gathering and they say well why don't you sit down and play us you
know a bunch of Beatles songs and we'll all sing together right and the poor guy
feels like a fraud because he's being expected by his friends and family to do
things that he just doesn't know how to do and so a lot of times it's not just
the the audience or or the it's not just the amateur musician or the beginner who
suffers because of these misconceptions but even even some very advanced
musicians are going around the world with some very deep insecurities and
they feel like they're not truly natural musicians they're not really creative
they're just kind of faking it and so I think that the value of what you can
bring with musical you and what we're trying to do with improvise for real is
not just to help beginners get into this beautiful enjoyable world of music which
is obviously the largest part of our audience but also even some very
accomplished musicians they have surprising insecurities and
votes and questions and so if you can help those people to feel better about
what they're doing and have kind of a a more complete experience as a musician I
think that's just as rewarding yeah I have to say I won't name names but it
was eye-opening to me in our first few months of musical you one of our first
members was a Grammy award-winning musician and they'd had all of this
success and I had the opportunity to talk with them on the phone and I was a
bit shocked just to hear you know even at that level that such a big part of
music making can be missing you know it's exactly what you just described
they were very accomplished in one path but if they tried to sit down and play
even happy birthday by ear they would have really struggled so did you find a
way then to connect up those worlds of the complex jazz you were enjoying
playing but not necessarily understanding by ear and they're just
sitting down with your guitar and maybe figuring out pop music by ear or
something's and blitt yeah but but only at the end of quite a long circle so for
example you know you'll relate to this because a musical you you start people
off and I think the right way in understanding chords and harmony which
is to focus on the sensations and of course thinking relative to the key so
you talk about the one chord and the four chord and the five core for example
and that connects us up to an experience that's very familiar for many musicians
many many musicians even you know quite a mature beginner musicians feel pretty
confident that they can not only recognize chords one four and five by
ear especially if it's in a predictable format like a 12 bar blues but they also
take it for granted that they should be able to easily play those chords in any
cue so if you ask this person you know could we play a 12 bar blues in the key
of G a lot of people can follow along with those chords and yet the same
person if you ask him to play a jazz standard like autumn leaves in an
unfamiliar key they would with the same confidence they would take it for
granted but that's impossible right that hasn't been nobody that's a three key
ability you've got to be some kind of like Rain Man
you know savant to do that right and yet autumn leaves only has it only has seven
chords so it's got four more chords then at 12 bar blues and so if I can
learn to recognize the three chords of a 12 bar blues by ear and if I could learn
to visualize them in any key on my instrument then why can't I do it with
four quarts more and then while we're on the subject why can't I do it with any
song I've ever heard right but it the only way that I was able to have that
realization for myself was what I needed kind of a middle sort of a middle level
of complexity which for me is what I found when I was living in Ueno site is
studying tango music because as as you know prior to that I had these two
worlds very separate I had the very simple tunes of the three chords and I
could play them in any key and the jazz standards that it should never occurred
to me to even try that and the nice thing about the tango music which it
shares with all Latin American music and a lot of American folk music is that
it's still pretty simple it's got you know just a few chords but you might
have the one chord before record the five chord and then maybe the two right
or the whole a section might be one and v 1 and v 1 and v and then in the bridge
it goes to the 6th chord right so it's just a little bit more just stretches
your mind that a little bit more but it's still simple enough that it's it's
worth trying to visualize all relative to the key and it kind of leads you very
naturally to that to that way of thinking about music that we all have
with a 12 bar blues but most of us don't have with jazz standards and so that
that formed the bridge that then got me thinking about that and then I started
going back to some simple of jazz standards like autumn leaves and saying
well instead of thinking of that it's just a random whatever is the first
chords bent on the key you played on the can a minor 7 chord what if I just
sketch that out as the 2 chord and I get the 2 chord the 5 chord but one chord
the 4 chord the 7 chord the 3 core the 6th part I say holy cow these are all
the chords of the major scale the whole song comes from a single major scale
right and so what was so hard about that and that's what inspired me to then you
know look for those same do that apply that same analysis to essentially every
song I'd ever played and and a lot of the way that we teach and improvise for
Rio is based on that realization and then following that through to its
conclusion mmm then you said something really interesting that I'd like to pick
up on which is approaching all of this in terms of the feel of the chords or
remembering how these progressions may sound or feel as you played them on your
instrument talk a little bit more about that because I think a lot of people
would hear the kind of terminology you just used like the two chord the six
chord and suddenly everything is sounding very abstract and theoretical
and mathematical how do those two worlds reconcile that's such a great point
I believe that creativity and an a genuine understanding of music is is the
result of the student having the opportunity to get to know the raw
materials of music firsthand okay I think human beings learn best when we're
able to explore the world directly and get to know the raw materials of our art
and when we make our own decisions our own creative choices about how to use
those materials it's through that process that you actually learn to
understand music in other words improvisation is not the
result of ten years of studying theory and learning what chords go with what
other chords and what scales should be cobbled on top of those chords and so
forth improvisation is actually activity that leads you to the understanding in
the first place if you think about the way we teach any other art form for
example in a painting class there might be some technique you learn maybe you're
talking about lighting effects for shortening or whatever but then there's
always this moment in the class that the teacher says all right class now you're
gonna have an opportunity to make your own original painting and you're gonna
choose the subject you're gonna choose the composition and we're going to
practice this skill that we just learned that's the same in poetry that's the
same in creative writing that's the same in drawing and graphic design
architecture anything and it even goes beyond the arts if you think about how
human beings learn anything maybe you want to learn a computer programming
language well as soon as you've learned two or three instructions the very next
thing that's going to happen is the teachers gonna say alright class now
what we're gonna do is you have this problem that we want you to solve using
these instructions that you've learned so I want you to write a simple program
that accomplishes this task and so it's it's understood that one of the most
important aspects of the learning process is for you to have to go into
that base of knowledge that you've just acquired and make creative decisions
about how to use it to do something that you want to do and to my knowledge
there's only one field in the world where this is not widely about it and
that's music in music I mean there are always exceptions right but but too many
people have had a very different experience in music where their
experience in music looks like the following you you show interest in music
as a kid somebody puts an instrument your hand and that begins a process of
10 years of learning basic music literacy learning to play the instrument
physically we learn to read sheet music so you're learning about things like
half notes and quarter notes of triplets and all kinds of other things and
there's a lot of good stuff that happens during that phase don't I mean I'm I'm
not trying to diminish that that we learn a lot about how to play the
instrument physically an interpretation of dynamics and also you know learning
to read sheet music is an important skill but then what happens for most for
most people is if you're very talented and you show a lot of potential then at
the end of that 10 years you might go on right and you go to a music school and
then you begin a more intense focus on theory and music history and composition
and these things and at the end of all of that now you're like in your early
twenties and finally we tell you all right Christopher society has made this
massive investment right and you've had all these experiences and you required
office knowledge and now the time has come for you to create your own original
music with all of these concepts but be careful because remember your music is
going to be judged alongside the music of Mozart right and Bach and Chopin and
Miles Davis and everybody else and so whatever you do it better be good right
and it's like the kind of crowning achievement of this whole process is
that's when the person just gives up on the whole thing and goes to work in a
bank right because it's just too much pressure and and it's my feeling is that
this whole this whole approach is outdated and it does a great disservice
to musicians to people who start out as music lovers who just want to have a
richer experience they just want to make music themselves they want to hear the
sounds they fall in love with the sounds when they discover their own ability to
play melodies that sound great because you're playing in a key of the music so
every note song is fantastic and you can draw these melodies across this across
the air like you're painting in the air right that's the experience that people
want they don't want the just the other part the technical part the physical
part the theoretical part and so what's missing it's really not very much what's
missing it makes the difference between the total package musician that has the
musicality that you talk about and the other person who feels totally blacked
and can't do anything without sheet music and suffers because of it the
difference is very simple it's when you know little Johnny or Susie is learning
the C major scale once you've gone through the once we've
done that there just needs to be another experience and it's the same experience
that you see in the computer programming classes in the painting classes in the
poetry classes which is all right Susie check this out you're gonna flip when
you see this we're gonna put on this jam track behind you and now you're just
gonna play any one of those notes of the scale and you can hear how great it
sounds and then you can just move freely between those notes and you can play
anything you want see that's not just Susie developing on
yourself creatively of learning to express herself through music in other
words it's not just Susie learning to improvise what it really is is Susie
learning to understand these notes and actually getting to know them get to
know them by working with them freely and playing them in any order and so
yeah that to me is was kind of the missing experience for me and it's the
missing experience for most people absolutely I think the respect we have
for the classical repertoire we've inherited leads to such misguided music
education you know as you describe so many years put into just
replicating music you know it's like we're learning to reproduce music rather
than make music and I think exactly the kind of experiences you describe of just
kind of giving people the opportunity and the permission to try things out
makes a huge difference right and I mean there are some components that go into
that because if we want this experience to lead to something even deeper and
richer tomorrow then there needs to be an organized path right so so tomorrow
there's a different set of sounds maybe it's a different scale a different chord
if somebody needs to organize that path for you so that you can eventually come
to have an understanding of harmony and you as you know there's a certain vision
of your instrument that's required to be able to do these things in any key and
all that but all of that can be learned and I think the point is not to diminish
at all the contribution of some of the most beautiful musicians I have ever
known and and really the ones who've got music on the deepest level our classical
performers who have never him provides the note in their lives and there is
such a universe there of beautiful you know problems challenges and lovely
opportunities and creativity and expression there's so much that goes
into the interpretation of music and so many conscious choices right like what
you're going to do in this section and get a section how you're going to link
them together what you do with timing and dynamics and so forth so it's not
it's not to diminish in any way people that do that because that's a
magnificent art form and I hope it always stays around but a lot of those
people doing that would also love to just you know sit down and jam and
improvise a solo with a band and they don't realize how available that is to
them they don't realize that it's like you're sitting there with a Ferrari with
everything you've learned about creating beautiful sounds on your instrument and
you're literally just missing the key right I mean you're cementing a couple
little things to help you see how you can create your own music in any context
and so that's really exciting is I think I think is what I'm trying to say is
that people who can't improvise or are mystified by the whole process what they
need to understand is that improvisation is not like this whole other field that
you have to go off and learn and everything you have learned about your
instrument everything you've learned from listening to the music you love
everything about you as a person your values your tastes your sensitivity you
bring all that with you to the very first time you improvise and so if you
just have a structured experience where you can get to know this artform called
musical improvisation it's not like starting over it's like discovering Wow
I you know I I get to see a different side of myself I didn't realize I had
all this inside me I think you touched on something important there which is
that even improvisation comes with some baggage socially you know I when I think
back to when I was learning music I I wouldn't really have explored
improvisation very much because I didn't want to be an improviser you know
sometimes there was an opportunity to play a guitar solo in a rock song and
that was fine and I knew my scale patterns and I could do it but I
wouldn't have really dived into improvisation because I didn't think of
myself as someone who particularly yearned for that creative outlet but I
think if someone had framed it to me more as you know this is the part to
really understanding the music you're playing this is the path to having a the
ability to create whatever form that might take I think I would have got a
lot more excited about it and I think you know it's interesting that we
started this conversation talking about jazz and you also mentioned you know
looking at the rock stars on MTV because I think improvisation in both of those
contexts comes with a lot of assumptions and I'd really love to talk more about
your approach improvise for real because in the first episode of this series for
improv month I talked about two of the most common approaches to learning to
improvise and maybe the drawbacks those have the first being the Jazz tradition
of learning vocab so you study the greats you memorize their licks and
riffs and then you essentially pull those out of your bag when it comes your
turn to step forwards and the rock more traditional Rock approach which is
you'll learn your scale pattern and maybe some rhythmic ideas and you'll
noodle around in the right kind of note group and it will sound okay both of
which to my mind are quite far from true improvisation and so I'd love to hear
your perspective on those approaches and whether they
have a place in improvisation and also how you look at things that improvise
for real yeah wow you mean so many great points there I've had the same
experience where many of our students wouldn't use that word improvisation to
describe their musical goal right now are there fantasy they might say the
different way they want to be able to jam they want to be a better
instrumentalists they want to be able to play with a band maybe they want to
write their own songs and so there's a learning curve there there's that
there's a there's an explanation there that we need to get better at doing to
help them understand our vision of how they can achieve all those things and
and not allow that confusion surrounding the word improvisation so to get in the
way of that connection the things you mentioned about the different approaches
to improvisation or the teaching improvisation is also very interesting
you know without going into a long social commentary about how the word got
to be the way it is our view is that the first thing that we want to make sure
our students have is the understanding that the world of harmony is finite what
you can do with it is infinite but what you hear in 99% of the music that
surrounds you on a daily basis is finite its knowable and our responsibility is
to give students a system that they can visualize in their mind like if you
think about Google Maps right and I mean it's wonderful you can see you can zoom
in you can zoom out you can see your street you can see the whole
neighborhood you can even go down and see the street view right and see photos
of things on the street that's our responsibility as music teachers to give
students that experience of harmony in other words they should they should feel
that each harmonic situation that they're learning about connects to
others they should see how it all fits together they should be able to go down
and do the street view right where they're improvising and they're working
with the notes and down inside the thing but they should also be able to lift
their view up and get a bird's-eye view and see how it all fits together that's
I think our first mission is that is to help people understand
that that view of harmony is possible that you can have a very simple and very
elegant model of our musical system in your mind that you can then explore now
the knowledge of those sounds is going to come from your exploration so it's
not up to me to tell you how to use those sounds my view is it's not up to
me to give you vocabulary it's up to me to show you the map and to show you how
you can go down and rock those streets and get to know all those neighborhoods
for yourself the interesting thing is that when people connect this vision of
harmony with the personal experience of getting to know the sounds through
improvising they develop that musicality that you're teaching it musically you
and the result of this process is a very different definition of improvisation
improvisation is no longer spitting out licks and vocabulary that somebody else
gave me now it actually becomes very similar to some of the ear training
exercises that you teach at musical you because what people discover through the
process is there's there's a there's a hidden Factory but a lot of people don't
know it even exists in the very beginning which is what I call your
musical imagination now what I'm talking about is your imagination for the sounds
so for example if somebody starts laying down a really cool bass line in a nice
you know jazzy kind of sound you know one one thought process and one belief
system is okay what quarter their claim and then what scale would fit correctly
over that chord and what kind of lick or vocabulary can I use to start myself but
there's a whole other thought process which is to just close your eyes and
listen and imagine yourself imagine a fantasy that you were watching the most
beautiful concert that you ever heard in your life and the way the concert begins
is with that bass line and then suddenly another musician starts to play what's
the very first note that she plays or she plays what is that sound and if you
can hear that sound in your mind that is your inner composer that's your musical
imagination right there and so then using the skills that you teach at
musical you and that we teach there provides for real as well
the idea is to be able to transcribe that sound how do you do that because
you've played with it before because of that Google Maps experience when you
were exploring the world of Harmony you know that's note six and you play it and
it's gorgeous and it works and nobody needed to tell you it was right and you
don't need anybody else's vocabulary and so what you discover after going through
this process is that you already have vocabulary you have endless vocabulary
inside you it comes from all the records you've ever listened to and it's
filtered through your taste your values your personal appetite for the sounds
and so that to me is just a much more exciting thing to be dedicating our
lives to once I discover that I have that voice inside myself I don't care
about other people's work a bit it's not that it's not beautiful it's not that
their music isn't lovely but I feel like if I've listened to it deeply whatever
I've been able to learn from it is already inside me and so the exciting
experience I want to have is just that feeling of total freedom where I can
create the music myself and express the songs that I imagine and that's really
what we teach them the best for you fantastic well what you've described
I think definitely is the dream of improvising but I feel like there's a
spectrum and on one end of the spectrum that there's the kind of formulaic rule
based improvisation like you've learned your vocab or you know your scale
pattern that's fairly easy to learn to do step by step but it doesn't give you
that kind of creative freedom on the other end of the spectrum you have the
kind of romantic jazz story of the guy who just goes and practices hours in a
shed until he can magically improvise out of nowhere just by playing right how
do you connect up those two worlds how do you fill in that middle ground that
lets people learn that kind of beautiful creative free improvisation you just
described but in a clear step-by-step way um I think what you just described
is exactly our mission we don't do everything at improvise for real we
don't teach rhythmic patterns we don't teach sight-reading sheet music we don't
teach musical literacy even though those skills are very important even though
there's a lot to be gained from all of that we don't do that there's just one
thing that we do it's just one thing we want to do
we want to be the best in the world and that's providing that step by step path
an organized journey that should be fun and creative from the very first day
that should lead people in an organized way through the world of Harmony but
making use of improvisation every step of the way so in other words day 1 let's
say you're improvising in the major scale over what we call the one accord
ok so we've got 1 3 & 5 going in the background and you're just getting to
know the notes as they sound in that context well then tomorrow we
can do something else tomorrow we could maybe improvise with the same major
scale but now maybe what's sounding in the background is the 2 chord and that
changes everything ok now this is not an overnight process this is a lifelong
journey but at some point the person's own intuition and desires and personal
goals begin to take over and they can interact with our material in a much
more flexible way the same way one of things I like about musical you is that
you offer people roadmaps and a and a plan and a vision of how to get to where
they want to go but it's also built in to the process that they have the
flexibility to go deeper into some areas than others and to do things in the
order that they need to and I think that's necessary for anybody I mean as
as you know if our students are musicians almost by definition we're
talking about sensitive people who don't want to be told what to do and they
don't want it they don't want it they don't want to study stuff that doesn't
mean anything to them that doesn't make sense to them they have a burning desire
to figure out something in each moment right and if we can help them get in
contact with that and that's that's kind of our job what we do at improvise for
real is to try to lay out that path for example there's the book and provides
for real and then there's this series of jam tracks that we've published and
literally just going through those jam tracks first level 1 and level 2 and
level 3 what they're doing is they're they're
going through all these different harmonic situations we're leading them
by the hand and at every step of the way they're getting to know the sounds by
working with them by improvising with them by playing solos with them and so
yes at the end of this process you're going to be a monster improviser because
your entire practice routine is improvising that's
what you're doing all day long but if we've done our job properly then the
path should also be very understandable it should feel very much like that
Google Maps kind of experience where you could see the world of harmony and
there's nothing particularly complicated about it it should feel like a very rich
landscape of beautiful things to discover and it should be organized in
such a way that the abstraction gets layered in overtime so the very first
principle should be very easy to understand you should build a very solid
mastery of them and then it becomes easy to understand variations on that or
abstractions and that's really you know the work I've been doing for the last
ten years so you know I I think getting into the mechanics of it is um you know
it's maybe not that interesting to the listeners as far as exactly like what we
do first and second and third but but the way you ask the question is actually
a very lovely mission statement right like like every day that we wake up
we're returning to your question how do you help a musician develop that freedom
that total musicality that allows him or her to feel that complete creative
freedom improvising composing jamming with friends performing maybe forming a
band how do we give them those experiences or make those experiences
possible through a Learning Path that incorporates a deep understanding of
harmony and total creative freedom right from the very beginning yeah it's the
exact opposite of the approach where first we're going to tell you a bunch of
stuff about music and you're gonna practice your instrument for 10 years
and then we're just gonna throw you out onto the stage and you know force you to
do something the idea is that if you learn something then you should see it
clearly you should be able to play it in all 12 keys you should be able to
recognize the sounds by ear you should be creative with those sounds you should
be making your own music without sand and that can be very simple but we can
do that with 1 2 & 3 but if you're learning notes 1 2 & 3 you should be
able to recognize mary had a little lamb right it's tying those things together
so that you can perceive what we're really talking about it's not
theoretical these are human sensations that we've got to get to know and we
have that were way to wrap our mind around
the Google Maps sort of vision right of harmony but more important as the
personal experience getting to know the sounds and my perspective is the most
most effective way to do that is through being creative with them it's through
improvising and and even composer making up your own chord progressions fantastic
well I know that a lot of our listeners who have either shied away from
improvisation because they weren't sure it was for them
well maybe have tried learning to improvise but found themselves trapped
in you know patterns and rules and memorization probably feeling really
inspired and enlightened right now because the approach you take improvise
for real I think lives up to its name you know you are teaching the true
spirit of improvisation and I love how step-by-step and practical you've made
that for people to learn do you have any advice for someone who is just getting
started in this journey I think my advice would be the most important
advice that I would give to any person who is longing for a musical experience
is to try to separate the social issues of the tribe's the internet trolls the
people who spend all day online arguing about music theory and all these things
there's so much of that that to a beginner can be so intimidating and we
have our own things that we bring to this as well we've all been exposed to
too much television we all you know we're all guilty of the kind of
celebrity culture of idolizing people and so forth all of that is a
distraction okay there's something here that if you
can just get a taste of it it's so beautiful it's so joyous I mean music
we've musicians are so fortunate because we are fascinated by an art form that
people actually like you can go anywhere in the world and it's very hard to find
people that would just say as a blanket statement I don't like music right I
mean we all like different kinds of music but it's maybe one out of a
hundred people that would say he just or she doesn't like music if you compare
that to the people who say I'm not interested in poetry I don't like you
know I don't like to go to art museums right so everybody loves me and it has
that wonderful component to it that it's something that we all
feels visceral it's something we can share with others but then it also has
this amazing social component that you can do it with other people you can jam
together whether it's just a simple pleasure of playing in time like just
playing written sheet music and a big band or something or whether you're
strumming chords in a rock band or whether it's something more interactive
where you're soloing and having a real dialog I mean this is just the most
wonderful art form it's such a cultural treasure and I feel that it's
everybody's birthright right like these kids all over the world should be
jamming there should be jam sessions on every street corner of every city in the
world and you know almost free right it's totally anti consumer anti
materialist you get a little instrument for a couple hundred dollars it can open
up this whole kingdom of of pleasure and enjoyment and fascination for the rest
of your life you don't even care about the new iPhone whatever is coming out
right and I would just encourage people my advice would be to stay focused on
that focus on yourself and your own experience and what you can experience
through music because there is something so beautiful that's waiting for you
there that once you get into that all the other stuff kind of goes away it
gets smaller and you don't really care anymore whether you're the smartest guy
on the chat forum or somebody considers you the best musician in your town like
all those ego things just kind of don't really matter anymore because you're
you've found something so much more interesting and valuable wonderful it's
been such a pleasure to talk with you David and I would highly recommend
improvise for real to any of our listeners who were excited and intrigued
by the things we've been discussing today thank you again David for joining
us on the show thank you so much Chris for a really crucial unlock your full
musicality with musical you membership find out Wharram
cállate podcast.com /join that was so much fun
David has such passion for teaching music through the creative practice of
improvisation and I love his perspective on how to make it easy and accessible to
any musician there was a ton packed into that conversation let's do a quick recap
David grew up surrounded by music his dad was a jazz trumpeter and he started
playing guitar early but it didn't come easily and in fact was quite hard work
for the first few years but then he said he hit a tipping point where his
abilities got to the stage that he could actually enjoy the learning process and
from there he was hooked he went on to gig with a band playing jazz standards a
couple of nights a week and that really pushed him to learn on that particular
part but interestingly he pointed out that this style of playing and
performing isn't necessarily connected at all with the world of improvising
that he went on to discover after making a conscious decision not to pursue big
career success in music he was able to pick up his guitar and reconnect with
the pure enjoyment of making music and he found that he was able to figure out
simple music by ear not yet the complex jazz music that was still a separate
world for him but in time it was Argentinian tango music that provided a
bridge from the simple one four fives of rock and pop to more varied chords and
eventually even the jazz music made sense to his ear we talked about the
traditional approach to learning music which can have you study for years or
even decades before you're finally given permission to compose music of your own
and how different and more enjoyable the journey can be if musical creativity is
incorporated from day one we talked too about how even the word improvisation
brings with it some baggage it's clear that for David improvisation is simply
the essence of musical creativity and the activity of improvising can be a
vehicle for learning all the inner skills of musicality that we talk about
on this podcast I loved his description of how they approach teaching improv at
improvise for real with the goal being to give you a Google Maps like view of
the music you hear so that you're not dependent on
memorized vocabulary or sticking to rules and patterns but you can trust
your musical imagination and you have the ear skills needed to translate what
you imagine out into the real world if you've been following along with our
improv month episodes or you're a member of musical you then you'll know how well
that matches up with our own view of what true improvisation is when David
described the vision of a free creative musician casting aside all the social
pressures and mental hang-ups around improvising and really just focusing in
on the pure enjoyment of music making I was reminded of our recent episode with
Nick Mennella of the 10-minute jazz lesson podcast when Nick talked about
the advice you get to pick up your instrument and just play like Nick David
obviously recognizes the importance of giving students not just that goal of
just playing and the permission to experiment and try things out but also
providing a clear step-by-step path that equips them with the skills needed to
make that playing what they want it to be you may have noticed that when
talking about improvise for real we didn't really say much about particular
instruments or particular styles of music and that comes back to what David
said about the spirit of true improvisation that even on day one when
you improvise for the very first time you are bringing to it all your
experience and identity as a musician and you already have the ability to
imagine the perfect notes you want to play what remains is to learn how to
interpret what you imagine and make it real David was kind to mention musical
you as one way you can learn those skills but certainly I would highly
recommend the path he's put together himself at improvise for real and it's
something I have no hesitation recommending to existing members of
musically you because it's beautifully complementary to the improv training we
provide ourselves so if you're feeling excited by this idea of putting creative
music making at the heart of learning music and whether you have any interest
in ever improvising a solo or writing a song I think you'll understand after
hearing David speak how improvising can still be a wonderful vehicle for simply
learning to understand and enjoy the music you love and play
so if you're feeling excited then do checkout improvise for real calm where
you'll find an easy way to get started exploring this great approach to
learning to improvise I hope you enjoyed this episode stay tuned for our next one
where we'll pick up on something David talked about the importance of
understanding the harmonic context you're improvising in we'll be talking
about improvising using scales and chords thank you for listening to the
musicality podcast this episode has ended but your musical journey continues
head over to musicality podcast comm where you will find the links and
resources mentioned in this episode as well as bonus content exclusive for
podcast listeners
For more infomation >> Carles Puigdemont, abierto a que toda España se pronuncie sobre cuestión catalana - Duration: 6:49. 
For more infomation >> Como Usar La Plataforma Zoom - Duration: 11:13. 
For more infomation >> Últimas noticias: Día del Padre: ¿Por qué se celebra el 19 de marzo? - Duration: 4:25. 
For more infomation >> MARCO ANTONIO SOLIS,ANA GABRIEL,JUAN GABRIEL,ROCIO DURCAL SUS MEJORES CANCIONES-MIX ROMÁNTICAS 2018 - Duration: 2:07:34. 
For more infomation >> Kimera - Con Fuego - Duration: 4:32. 
For more infomation >> Bust of the hevy metal singer Rosendo! second part - Duration: 6:21. 
For more infomation >> A new life for CELG - Duration: 1:06. 
For more infomation >> La PANTERA ROSA en Español - Historieta en Rosa - Capitulos 2018 - Duration: 7:13. 
For more infomation >> LEGO® Ninjago® High Spee...
For more infomation >> Dahi Aloo Recipe In Marathi | दह्यातले बटाटे | Dahyatle Batate | Dahi Batata Recipe | Archana Arte - Duration: 3:16. 
For more infomation >> 장 범준에게 46 억 원을 준 벚꽃 결말|조회수8.212.910 - Duration: 2:28. 
For more infomation >> Capas germinales y desarrollo embrionario - Duration: 6:38. 
For more infomation >> K.J. Maura: It's a dream I've always wanted to live - Duration: 1:53. 
For more infomation >> "I am not a witch" de Rungano Nyoni - Le conseil de Charlotte Lipinska pour le Masque et la Plume - Duration: 0:56. 
For more infomation >> Jaguar I-PACE | La creazione della migliore auto elettrica al mondo - Duration: 16:58. 
For more infomation >> Tomasz Barański i Katarzyna Dziurska odnieśli się do plotek o romansie! - Duration: 3:25. 
For more infomation >> Beata Tadla świeżo po rozstaniu z Kretem wygląda kwitnąco i bardzo młodo! - Duration: 3:10. 
For more infomation >> 3/19/18 6:30 AM (S La Salle St & I-94 & I-90, Chicago, IL 60609, USA) - Duration: 15:17. 
For more infomation >> Co za widok! Bella Hadid i Kendall Jenner wyskoczyły z bikini i pluskają się w oceanie topless! - Duration: 3:42. 
For more infomation >> BMW X1 2.0I SDRIVE HIGH EXECUTIVE - Duration: 0:58. 
For more infomation >> Chevrolet Captiva 2.4I STYLE 2WD / 7 PERS. !! - Duration: 0:55. 
For more infomation >> BMW Z4 Roadster 3.0I / AUTOMAAT / 232 PK / LEER / NAVI / LM 18 - Duration: 1:00. 
For more infomation >> Hyundai Santa Fe 2.7I V6 4WD DYNAMIC 7P. Clima Navigatie Leer Afn. Trekhaak 7-Persoons 17"LM 189Pk! - Duration: 0:53. 
For more infomation >> Toyota Verso 1.8 VVT-i Dynamic7p. - Duration: 0:41. 
For more infomation >> Krystian Wieczorek został ojcem! - Duration: 2:21. 
For more infomation >> Toyota Aygo 1.0 VVT-i x-joy Navi ( Navigatie, Climate control, Parkeercamera) - Duration: 0:59. 
For more infomation >> Więzień Labiryntu: Jak dobrze Thomas i Will się znają (polskie napisy) - Duration: 2:56. 
For more infomation >> Anna Lewandowska rzadko wspomina o swoim dzieciństwie: „Chodziłam w dziurawych butach zimą". - Duration: 3:34. 
For more infomation >> Psicologia della Vendita: Perché il Cliente Recede? | V60S #8 - Duration: 1:00. 
For more infomation >> Novo Sistema de Integração de Teresina passa a funcionar - Duration: 2:52. 
For more infomation >> Semana 30 de embarazo | 7º Mes | Embarazo semana a semana - Duration: 1:26. 
For more infomation >> Teresa Lipowska jest poważnie chora?! Nareszcie skomentowała doniesienia mediów - Duration: 3:42. 
For more infomation >> ZDZIWIŁEM SIĘ, GDY PRZYŁOŻYŁA ZAPALNICZKĘ DO RYŻU, - Duration: 2:28. 
For more infomation >> Xe ô tô tải, xe máy, máy bay - bộ đồ chơi ô tô trẻ em, nhạc thiếu nhi con heo đất remix - Duration: 15:42. 
No comments:
Post a Comment