If you’re trying to learn piano improvisation
or get better at piano improvisation you’ll know that it is pretty difficult. I can
totally relate to that: we’ve all been there, improvisation is tough for all of us on the
piano, especially when we’re just starting out. So today I’m going to show you a
very, very simple practice technique that will boost your confidence and fluency
when you’re improvising on the piano, especially when it comes to
right-hand, melodic improvisation. I’ve been using this technique since I was a
kid and it’s really helped me, and I think it will help you as well. We’re going to focus on
jazz and blues playing today, but the technique I’m going to show you is one can apply to piano
improvisation in pretty much any style of music. Let’s find out about it. The first thing we need to do is come up a piano
improvisation we can use to put this technique into practice. Now, I don’t want to spend hours
on this, so what I’m going to do is show you a really simple improvisation that you can build
up in baby steps if you’re a beginner, but which you should be able to grasp pretty quickly
if you’re already an experienced improviser. We’re in the key of C major, so it’s
nice and easy, and we’re working over a fixed left hand that just consists of
four chords. Those chords are F major 7, E minor 7, D minor 7 and C major 7 — in those
positions, yeah? And that’s it, you just loop it round and round and round. So if you’re new
to piano improvisation the first part of your mission, as soon as you’ve finished watching this
tutorial, is just to learn those chord shapes. Then in the right hand I’m going to
give you a limited number of notes to build an improvisation from.
Those notes are C, D, E flat, E, G and A — just six of them, and you can play
them in any octave. C, D, E flat, E, G, and A. Now the idea behind only giving you a limited
number of notes is that it helps you to deal with that intimidating feeling of, you know,
“oh my, I’ve got so many notes to choose from, what do I do, where on Earth do I start?”. It’s a
funny thing, but by strictly limiting the number of notes you can use you actually give yourself
more freedom to develop your improvisation. Now if you’re really new you won’t
want to use six notes straight away: you’ll probably be better off just
starting with two notes, for example C and G, and playing around with those,
rhythmically, over your left hand. And as you get confident with that
you can add a third note, like D. And build out and build out as you grow
in confidence until you’re gradually using all six notes of the scale. Now, what
we’re going to do in a few minutes is use our magic technique to show you how to create
interesting melodic improvisations using those six notes. But just to give you a sense of the
kind of thing we’re aiming for, hopefully in, say, three or four weeks’ worth of practice,
you should be able to do something like this. Now you don’t have to use that progression and
that scale — you can use any chord progression to practise this technique, and in fact I’ve
put some other progressions in a PDF for you along with tips and reminders you can use
when you’re practising this stuff later. You can download that PDF for free — and I’ll
tell you how to do that in just a few minutes. So what’s our amazing technique for
improvising better? Well, when you’re playing a piano improvisation your brain is
having to do a lot of different things at once, and there are several factors that make your
life more difficult - you’ve got to think about what notes to play, especially in the right,
you’ve got to think about the chord progression, you’ve got to think about maybe reading
a lead sheet and choosing rhythms and quite a few other things. All
we’re going to do is make our lives easier by temporarily eliminating one of
those factors, and that’s the factor of time. So we’re going to be using our fixed chord
progression in the left hand — as I said, you can use any progression for this, I’m just going
to stick to this one for now because it’s so clear and simple — but rather than tying those chords to
the tyranny of a fixed beat, you know, saying one bar, one measure of this chord, then a bar of this
chord, four beats of this, four beats of that, 1 2 3 4 - 2 2 3…. instead of that, it’s going to be
entirely up to you when you change chord in the left — you can do it slowly, quickly, randomly,
however you like. The beat has just disappeared. Why does that help you get better at improvising?
Well, if you think of your musical mind as being like your laptop or your phone or whatever,
all the different things you do when you’re improvising are like applications that are running
at the same time. So you’ve got an application to help you remember the chords, an application for
choosing melody notes, an application for reading your sheet music, and so on. But the application
that keeps you in time, on that unforgiving beat, that’s the one that gets in the way of
all the others and makes everything more difficult. If you temporarily
shut that application down, turn off the beat, it frees up a ton of
mental processing power, and you can use that extra processing power to focus on making
your other improvisational skills better. Now, at some point obviously you’re going
to have to put the beat back in — you can’t just flop around, playing beat-free forever.
And we’ll look at how to put the beat back in in a few minutes — but while we’re free of
that tyrannical beat we can use that as an opportunity to really sharpen up those other
skills. And if you do that in the right way, when things go back together
everything will sound better. So let’s think about some of the stuff you can do
to improve your right hand melodic improvisation in particular. Remember that over our little
chord progression — which we’re not counting, we’re changing chords whenever we like — we’re
improvising with these notes: C, D, E flat, E, G and A. And that, as you might
know, is basically just the C major pentatonic scale, plus an E flat
that we’ve lifted from the blues scale. So just start experimenting with the notes
of that scale, that kind of compound scale, yeah, over the chords in the left. And
don’t worry much about how it sounds, just let your fingers drift around those
notes doing random stuff. Chords in the left, but change them whenever you want and don’t
worry if you forget to change them and, you know, you spend ages — spend ages on one chord, yeah?
Remember, the secret of this technique is that we are not worrying remotely about timing – those
chords are just there to fill out the harmony and to give us a chance to experiment with and learn
about different sounds. Also don’t worry too much about your fingering in the right hand at this
stage: fingering pentatonics tends to be awkward anyway, so just get a feel of how the scale sits
under your hands and see how you can get on with different hand and finger positions, yeah? —
this exercise gives you the freedom to do that. You can also play any note of that scale over
any of the chords in the left, yeah? Don't think you always have to be landing on a chord note by
any means. And in fact one of the things you can do while you’re experimenting, away from the
beat, is deliberately try notes of the scale that don't belong in whatever left-hand
chord you’re playing – so you could try D or A above C major 7, yeah? Or E flat
above E minor 7 — a really crunchy, bluesy sound there. Every time you do that,
listen to the effects you're creating and learn what happens when you use
those particular combinations. By the way if you’re finding this tutorial
useful, please remember to LIKE it, say hello or ask me a question in the comments and
SUBSCRIBE to my YouTube channel. You could also check out my books, especially How to Really
Play The Piano, The Stuff Your Teacher Never Taught You, which will really help you if you
want to improve you knowledge of how chords work and how to get started with improvisation — it
really goes into a ton of detail on those things. You might also like to check out my crowdfunding
page at Patreon.com/billhilton - supporting me on Patreon comes with a load of great benefits,
not least access to my very popular Piano Packs. The Piano Packs are full of great exercises
and pieces to learn, with walkthrough videos to help you as you practise. Like I said, check
out Patreon.com/billhilton to find out more. OK, so once you’ve spent some time just kind of
randomly playing around with your scale notes, over your left hand chords, and remember — no
beat’s going on at all, timing doesn’t matter — once you’ve spent some time doing that, the next
thing I want you to do is to try to create musical phrases in your right hand. Music, and melody
lines in particular, should be like speech: and when you talk it's not just one continuous
babble of words – you don’t just know, you know, “blah blah blah blah this that this that blah blah
blah” without stopping — rather, you speak in a mixture of long and short sentences, with pauses
for breath with pauses for breath and with each phrase having a definite start and a definite
end. So what I want you to try doing is build, building these musical phrases without worrying
about the beat underneath — just try putting together phrases in, out of your right hand
scale — and sometimes they might be really short: that's a nice little phrase, just three
notes. Sometimes they'll be longer, OK? You could try doing runs up and down the
scale and joining them together with jumps, OK? And listen all the time and try to notice
what works musically and what doesn't. You're aiming for an effect that isn't just “random
note from the scale followed by another random note from the scale” – rather, what you're
trying to do is build musically logical phrases that you can then start sticking
together into a flowing improvisation. As you do it, you'll kind of… it takes
a bit of practice but you'll get a feel for it and you'll probably notice that
some things tend to come quite naturally, so a very effective thing to do is to have
two short phrases followed by a long one. OK? You don't have to come up with anything
massively complicated — really simple little phrases are fine, as long as you find them
musically satisfying — and that's the kind of condition of success: use your own innate, human,
musical intelligence to decide whether you find these things satisfying or not, OK? If you do
the chances are other people will do as well. As you grow in confidence with this technique you
can start to apply it to other progressions and other styles of music. So find the chord
progression from your favourite song, look up or figure out the pentatonic scale of the
key it's in, maybe add that flat third if you want a jazzy sound, and off you go. The same principle
always applies: don't be a slave to the beat, just play the chords as and when you like, and
improvise over the top of them. If you're stuck for ideas for progressions, by the way, I've
included several basic progressions — some of them really short some of them a bit
longer — in that PDF I mentioned earlier, along with some tips and reminders. You can
download that PDF entirely free of charge by visiting billspianopages.com/improv2020
— you don't need to sign up for anything, there's just a download link right there
on the page. Let me know what you think of those progressions and of those tips
in the comments underneath this video. So how do you go about putting the beat back
in? Because the challenge is you want to go back to playing with a beat, but you don't want to
lose all the skills that you've been working on while you've been playing without a beat. Well,
there are two techniques that you can use. First of all, you can add
the beat back in but take it really slowly — and I mean super
slowly — in both hands. 1 2 3 4… And that might feel frustrating at first, but
force yourself to do it and gradually speed up. The second technique is to alternate playing with
a beat and without a beat — so two minutes with a beat, two minutes without a beat. Both of those
techniques help you to kind of warm in gradually to playing with a beat again, while retaining
all of the skills and techniques you've been practicing without a beat. As I said, try it, let
me know in the comments how you get on, download the PDF from billspianopages.com/improv2020,
and have fun with this. And that's about it — if you've liked this
tutorial, I know that you'll also like my six-part tutorial series on jazz piano
for beginners — I'll add a link to that in a YouTube card — top right hand corner — and
also in the description text below this video. Don't forget to like and share this video,
subscribe to my channel and check out my Patreon page at patreon.com/billhilton. There
are a ton of really great benefits if you sign up to support me on Patreon. OK, happy piano
playing and I'll see you again very soon!
