Making your improvisations more interesting part two

Mark Wingfield looks at improvising melodically.

Improvising with melody isn't as difficult as it might at first seem. It helps if you first think about the fact that melody can be broken down into two components: the notes and the rhythm. If you have a developed facility to improvise with rhythm, them you are already halfway there (some would say more than half).

The rhythm.

If you're not sure how to improvise melodically, try this:

1) Tap a simple, but catchy rhythm with your finger on the table.

2) Take this rhythm onto your instrument, choose a basic scale (eg: major or minor scale) and play the notes in the scale to the rhythm.

There you have it! You have a basic melodic sound. Now as you experiment with the notes, but keep the rhythm the same, you'll find all kinds of melodic ideas will appear, some better than others of course.

Try this with another rhythm, but using the same scale. Now alternate the two rhythms, intermix them.

The notes.

People often have trouble improvising melodically because they use only the pentatonic scale (usually the minor pentatonic). Its actually quite hard to play a decent variety of melodies with this scale. Most melodies in rock, dance, jazz, and pop do not use the pentatonic scale, they use various major or minor scales (usually with 7 notes instead of the 5 the pentatonic gives you). So you might find that your chances of improvising melodically improve drastically if you are using the right kind of scale.

However, the next problem people often come across, once they have the full (not pentatonic) major or minor type of scale in hand (or indeed they may be using a mode eg: the Mixolydian mode), is that they have trouble getting it to sound like anything other than a scale.

Try this:

To break away from the "scale sound", choose two notes from the scale that are next to each other, and then another note that is several scale notes away. Use these three notes to play with. Putting a gap between the notes, or even better, as we did here; two notes together and one farther away, seems to help get the melody going, as well as helping to break away from the sequential note ideas that scales can seem to present.

Another very important thing to work on is ear training. If you can hear what all the notes in (or out) of your scale will sound like before you play them, its a lot easier to improvise melodically. A good teacher will help you train your ear.

Something else I really recommend is that you actually learn a load of melodies. They can be from anything, a pop song, a melody form a piece of classical music, a jazz tune, it doesn't matter - preferably you should like it though. Choose say 8 melodies from whatever sources, learn them all, commit them to memory. Then play the same melodies in other keys, or other positions (if you're a guitarist, violinist etc...). This will exercise parts of the melodic brain that nothing else can reach - especially if you play them in as many different positions as possible.

Next, once you've gotten to know some of these melodies really well, break them up into chunks of several notes. Most melodies can be fairly neatly broken into chunks. Then take a chunk of a melody and figure out which are the most important notes. Most melodic chunks can be broken down into what can be called the main notes (the notes without which the melody just wouldn't exist) and the passing notes (the notes which, though they may be important, could none the less be removed and the melody would still be recognisable).

Now keep the main notes in the melody, but experiment with replacing the passing notes with other notes.

You can use this method for improvising on an existing melody in a song as well. If you are improvising using the melody of the song or tune you are playing to, keep in mind exactly where you are in that melody as you improvise, even if you are not playing much of the actual melody in your improvisation. Try to play the feeling the melody gives you, using roughly the same notes (or perhaps just the main notes, filling in others in between); not actually trying to play the melody - just the feeling.

Finally, spend a lot of time listening to how great musicians improvise melodically. Of course not all great musicians improvise at all. So you might want to start by listening to the great jazz musicians, who are generally masters of melodic improvisation. You might want to pay particular attention to the jazz of now and the past 15 or so years, as much of jazz at the moment is very melodically based.

Mark Wingfield