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 on today's
episode I want to talk about something that is critical to creating an
improvisation that's interesting and satisfying for your listeners and for
yourself and that's structure and phrasing but first I want to talk a bit
about what happens without structure or phrasing on our last episode I finished
up by saying something about how compositions and songs have structure
whereas improvisation doesn't and hopefully you instinctively raised an
eyebrow at that because it sounds wrong doesn't it music without structure would
be pretty dull right just an endless stream of notes all sounding roughly the
same so we know instinctively that improvised music should have structure
to it yet many of the traditional ways of learning improvisation miss this we
started out improv month talking a bit about how you can try to improvise by
just sticking to fixed patterns or rules or you can learn specific riffs and
build up a vocabulary to reproduce and and call that improvising and even if
you go a step better than that and use the kind of scale and chord ideas we
talked about in our previous episode without structure your improv will sound
pretty bland you'll be filling the time and choosing notes that sound ok but
it's not going to capture the audience's attention it's not going to take them on
a journey or move them or be memorable so today I wanted to talk about just two
things that you can introduce to your improvisation that will transform it
from that blend stream of notes into something much more like real music as
part of improv month we're releasing a whole series of new training modules
inside Musical U to help with improvising and two of them are
dedicated to this topic one on phrasing and one on structure and form there is a
ton packed into those modules to really teach this stuff fully but for now I'm
just gonna be pulling out a couple of the simple ideas that you can start
applying immediately so first of all phrasing I'm sometimes surprised when I
talk to members of Musical U about phrasing because I find the level of
familiarity with that idea varies hugely for me I grew up singing and playing
wind instruments so my teachers were talking about phrasing from day one as
part of thinking about where to take a breath and I think I was lucky to have
some teachers who were good at encouraging me to think about how the
performance would sound rather than just hitting the right notes so that I was
always thinking about shaping phrases especially in choirs that was a really
big deal but sometimes I talk to musicians now who are quite accomplished
but don't really know what I mean when I talk about phrases or I talk to
musicians who understand phrases when they're playing from sheet music but
it's never occurred to them that this could be relevant for improvising too so
a quick definition a musical phrase is just a short section of a melody that
has a beginning and an end we normally think of phrases as things that are a
bar or too long so we're talking about maybe five seconds of music that kind of
scale and we use that word because they are analogous to spoken phrases a spoken
phrase is more than one word and it generally belongs with other phrases in
a sentence similarly a musical phrase is more than one note and it generally
belongs with one or more other phrases to form a short section of the piece you
don't want to labor that analogy too much it's not exact but it is useful to
think of a musical phrase as something that has its own identity as a little
thing but probably doesn't quite stand alone it's going to need other phrases
to really work often a phrase will have a little pause before the next phrase
begins or there will be some shaping of the phrase with dynamics or expression
to indicate that it has come to an end a common rule of thumb given to singers
especially is that the volume should increase and then decrease within each
phrase it should start a bit more quietly increase in volume at its middle
and and a bit more quietly again that varies
depending on the music but it's a good default to think about try listening out
for this next time you listen to some music see if you can tell where a phrase
starts and ends based on volume or the way notes are played when it comes to
improvisation phrasing is the first level of structure we can give our
improv instead of just choosing note after note until we filled up the time
we can think in terms of starting a phrase building it up and bringing it to
an end and what's cool is that this naturally leads us to start thinking
about what happens from one phrase to the next it combines perfectly with that
idea of constraints and dimensions that we've been talking about in recent
episodes will your next phrase use the same constraints or will you adjust them
so that it can explore a new dimension for example you could use a fixed
rhythmic pattern for the first two phrases and then relax that constraint
and explore a new rhythm with your third and fourth phrase or you could stick to
a certain set of three notes for your first phrase and then suddenly introduce
a fourth note in your second phrase one phrasing idea we dive into in our
training module on this is call and response where you have two phrases and
the first one creates a kind of musical question that the second one then
answers it's a really elegant way to draw your listener in and then provide a
satisfying conclusion and there are a variety of ways you can use it in your
improvising our training modules go on to talk about structure and form some of
the bigger picture things you can introduce to your improvisation to make
it musically effective but for now I want to talk about the second idea you
can apply immediately which is related to what I just said about creating a
question and then answering it there are a few ways you can do that in music but
one is to create tension and then to release it something you can deploy as
call-and-response but actually has a much wider impact to
at any given moment in music there are going to be note choices for you as the
improviser that sound comfortable and to note choices that create tension if you
have a harmony accompaniment like you're playing chords in the left hand on
bored or someone is strumming guitar along with you
then your improvised melody can create tension against the current chord if
there's no accompaniment then you can still play with this idea because as we
talked about in our previous episode on improvising with scales and chords you
can imply harmony with the notes you choose in a melody so that the listener
is expecting notes that blend well with a certain chord and then when you
introduce a note that doesn't blend it can create that tension
generally speaking choosing notes from the current chord will sound comfortable
with the root note being the most relaxed choosing notes from outside the
chord will create a bit of tension and as a rule of thumb if they're a whole
step from a chord note that's also called a major second or a tone then
there will be some tension and if they're a half step also called a minor
second or a semitone away from a court note there will be strong attention so
for example if the current chord was C major and you chose to play the note C
there's no tension that's the root note of the chord it'll blend right in but if
you chose to play the note B which still belongs to the C major scale is still in
key but it's half step away from the chords root C so that's gonna sound very
dissonant and tense that's a simple case in point but the important thing to
understand is that there is always this dimension to the music you improvise how
it creates tension or doesn't and when we're thinking about phrasing and
structure we can use that tension we can choose to play notes that create tension
in our phrase and then move on to a note that releases the tension this is
happening all the time in the music we listen to in small ways and in big
dramatic ways and it's a big part of what makes music sound interesting
rather than bland so it is an essential tool to have in your tool kit as an
improviser the way I described it there was quite music theory heavy thinking
about scales and chord notes and half steps and whole steps and while that is
one way to approach this very popular with jazz players for example you can
also use it in a much more ear guided way
at any given moment you will be able to instinctively imagine a note that would
clash and create tension so with some ear training you can just bring that
imagined note out on your instrument whether or not you've thought through
the music theory relationships going on so those were two simple ideas about
phrasing and structure that you can apply to your own improvisation and
there is plenty more to explore on this topic as we've been covering in our
modules inside musical you the bottom line is that the audience knows what to
expect in music they know that there should be structure and phrasing that
there should be a rise and fall tension and release and the thing is if you've
been playing music for a while you know this too if you were to sing something
improvised you would probably instinctively sing in phrases and give
it some structure the trouble comes because of how most people learn to
improvise it's so divorced from their musical instinct they're following rules
or remembering licks or just trying hard not to sound bad and so none of their
natural ability to create meaningful music comes out that's why at musical
you were so fixated on helping people go beyond that or to skip that frustrating
approach in the first place our improv training focuses on
developing your ear so that you can take that natural creative musical
imagination and translate it onto your instrument and out into the world so
everything I've been talking about today these aren't really new things for you
to learn from scratch they're really just reminders reminders of how you
already know music should work and remind us to bring that to your
improvisation if you've been improvising based on rules patterns or memorizing
licks then this is going to take some effort to introduce but if you're
approaching improvisation in the way we teach in our new improv roadmap this
will actually all come really naturally and with very little extra practice
you'll be able to phrase and structure your improvised music to be interesting
moving and memorable for yourself and for your listeners more about that
roadmap and how you can take advantage of it in our next episode
hey Christopher here I hope you're enjoying improv month a couple of things
I wanted to let you know about the first is we're running a free improvisation
masterclass at the end of the month it's on Saturday 31st of March 2018 and you
can sign up to watch it live online at musicalitypodcast.com/improv the
second is that we're running a special promotion at the end of the month to
celebrate the launch of our new improv roadmap at Musical U you can get a
great deal on Musical U membership and we're giving you as a podcast listener
exclusive early access and a special bonus gift if you've thought about
joining Musical U you won't want to miss this check out the details at that
same link musicalitypodcast.com/improv
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