Improvisation Tips

If you want to compose music, you might want to spend some time improvising music. Many websites claim that they can teach you to “Improvize blues/jazz/gospel/what-have-you in 12 days… even if you’ve never touched a piano before! Buy our free e-book for $299.99!” That is because they are scams. Yeah, there are probably some good ones, but there are probably hundreds or thousands of courses on the internet that make impossible claims like this. I’m a real cheapskate, so I say if it’s not free, it’s not worth the trouble.

Before you can improvise very well, you have to know a bit about how to play the piano. I’m not saying you shouldn’t try improvising before you’ve reached pianistic enlightenment, but you should learn some practical piano pieces and some music theory as well as learning how to improvise so that you have all areas up to about an equal skill level. If you’re at level 1 (RCM standards) in playing the piano, you’ll probably only be able to improvise at about a grade 1 level, which is okay. If you’ve played the piano for years, and you’ve been improvising all that time as well as playing, you’ll be at a higher improvisation skill level.

If you want to just hit random keys on the piano and see how they sound, go ahead, no one should really stop you. Ideally, you will eventually figure out some interesting techniques on your own.

If you want a bit of a head start, though, I can give you a few tips:

-Know some, if not all, major and minor keys. This is part of musical theory, but it can also help you in improvisation. Knowing music theory isn’t necessary to be good at improvisation, but knowing key signatures can give you a bit of a guide to choosing a melody and chords as you go along.

-Know basic major and minor chords and their inversions. These are the chords you’ll be using most of the time, or at least they’re the chords I use most of the time.

-When practicing improvisation, don’t worry about making it sound perfect or even fitting it with any musical form. If you hit a strange, awkward sounding chord, no one will ever know, so just keep going. Even if you are performing in front of an audience, they probably won’t notice if you just keep going.

-When practicing, record your improvisation sessions on tape, incase you come up with some interesting sounding chords or melodies for more structured musical compositions. For this reason, try to get a higher quality sound recorder than I got (I got a not-very-good tape recorder that always changes the key of a musical piece by a whole tone or so when you play it back) so that you can listen to each individual note in each chord.

-Use this as an opportunity to finally practice scales and arpeggios. Try experimenting by playing different chords on different hands, playing scales in different directions, or playing arpeggios with scales. Do whatever you want.

-Listen to a lot of piano music in your favourite musical genre. For example, I like bold romantic-era music like Franz Liszt, so I listen to a lot of that kind of music. So, my improvisations, annoyingly, sound a lot like that.

Improvising on the piano, however, is something you learn best by doing, so these tips are jut some guidelines and suggestions. Find out what works out best for you.