I am by nature an improviser. I learned the guitar almost exclusively through writing, noodling and improvising for 10 years. A large percentage of my live playing is improvisational, even the chords/leads/fills to cover songs.
But I find it very difficult to have both spontaneity and solid technique. This is perhaps the most disappointing aspect of guitar playing for me. I don’t think I am alone in this, however. I’ve always noticed that John Petrucci’s memorized/worked out solos are FAR cleaner and faster than his improvisational moments. I think its very evident on the new Liquid Tension album. In the jam songs, none of his improvised solos have the fire and precision of his worked out solos.
On the other hand you have Guthrie Govan and Frank Gambale improvising with staggering accuracy.
When I improvise, my technique is much more raw and sloppy than, say a fully warmed up set of descending sixes.
Does anyone else struggle with this? Is this the curse of lesser mortals trying to get along in a world where people like Guthrie Govan and Martin Miller exist?
How do you improvise with great technique without resorting to worked up formulas?
We have an interview with Martin himself addressing the challenge of “playing through the changes” (AKA improvising):
In a nutshell, “virtuoso-level” improvisation is about becoming comfortable with a huge “bag of licks” that you refine in your practice time. Each of these is memorised, but the more you have the more you can combine them creatively on the fly while you improvise.
As far as we know, the idea that you can truly compose a technically complex line on the spot (and perform it perfectly) seems to be largely an illusion.
Double-escape is magical and it needs no rule! If somebody can do that they are done.
But for everything else, it seems that somebody needs to be able to think several notes ahead, in order to choose between HO/PO, swipe, flipping USX ↔︎ DSX, and so forth, so that they can continue properly using their technique.
Now you’ve got me wondering: “How many notes of look-ahead are needed to play perfectly for a given technique?”
My guess: A good improviser is working on a phrase and this gives enough look-ahead to easily place the notes in real time, and not on a single note at a time.
How do jazz pianists improvise at high speeds? I only dabble at piano but I know enough to know that are some hefty guidelines as to which sequences of fingers will ‘work’ at high speed scale/arpeggio playing. You have to cross over the thumb with the other fingers (or under the other fingers with the thumb) and there are probably even more considerations when playing notes with varied spacings and if you’re going between black/white keys as per the harmonic context. To me, that sounds like more variables than we alternate pickers are faced with, and I may only be scratching the surface too!
I hope I’m not making myself feel better (I SUCK at improvising, at least when the music is “interesting” harmonically i.e. contains notes outside the key or modulates) by agreeing with this…but surely this has to be it! I’m curious if there have been any studies on great improvisers like John Coltrane or Bill Evans…if we sampled a vast amount of their improvised solos and categorized all the various melodic fragments…would we find the licks recurring, in random orders? I know in Giant Steps I hear plenty of recycled melodic fragments. That’s just one example though.
I’d love a formal study. It would be difficult though as even a highly trained analytical musician could miss what’s really a reused lick if the improvisor was free with the rhythmic structure, or was going through a ‘pattern’ on their instrument in a slightly different order.
Yeah I think ultimately there can be no other answer. The technical aspect of musicianship is ultimately reduced to just motor memory. I know that my problem is that I spent the vast majority of my guitar life just doing the fun part Martin talked about and NOT addressing the technical aspect of the lick that I just came up with. Instead of really working it out technically, I’d just continue to improvise with it until it’s more or less functional.
This is inspiring. Especially to hear it out of the mouth of a giant like Martin Miller. Because as I said, at my heart I’m an improviser and creator. I’d much rather work on my own material than someone else’s. I just have to harness the discipline to work out passages and riffs cleanly instead of just continuing to create and noodle around the idea.
This rather anecdotal, but I think I have heard from enough musicians, teachers, documentaries, etc, and of course, from the records themselves, that Coltrane had the workings of the now infamous “Trane Changes” displayed in Giant Steps worked out LONG before the tapes started rolling. I talked about this in a friendly debate on this forum about the commonly perceived correlation between perfect pitch and good musicianship -
Listen to Tommy Flanagan’s solo on Giant Steps. That is a world class pianist basically sight reading that tune. Again this is mostly anecdotal, but I have heard that the rhythm section was pretty fresh to Giant Steps at the time of recording. Compare Tommy’s solo to Trane’s. It’s not even in the same universe. I think I heard that Trane had worked out those changes for 6 months before he recorded it. Perhaps on that Chasing Trane documentary on Netflix.
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I can see the virtue in this, but I think when it comes to improv, the lines will still have to be worked out before hand, regardless of how they are picked. I know with me, often my left hand is getting confused when I’m improvising. I think at this point I have a very clear knowledge of what technically works for my picking hand (2wps, sweeping, economy), it’s just I have to buckle down with the lines I create and actually work them up to where they are reliable on the spot. Cuz even if I can pick with double escape, it won’t get me lines like Olli lol. But I definitely see where that would be a very free way of playing - just memorize the overall flow and pattern of the lick and never really have to worry about RH intricacies.
I think long story short, I basically already knew the answer to my question. I am in the camp where I believe there is no such thing as true improv. But I am inspired now to work out the details of my created lines and riffs.
I think maybe a ‘motif’ could be improvised or knowing where you want to take a ‘run’ through certain key changes can be decided on the fly, but the actual fingers/fingering of anything above (insert whatever speed limit barrier here) likely needs to be worked out and practiced in advance, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to get the synchronization up to speed.
So someone who ‘never plays the same solo twice’ could very well be re-using lines or runs that share identical groupings of fingering/picking but move them around to different modal changes based on whatever top tier artists use to decide where a song wants to go in the moment.
Does that make sense? It’s me idly thinking on a Friday afternoon!
I agree with this. Where I’m from, there is a legendary, world class jazz guitarist and I was lucky enough to take from his teacher. He was obviously proud that such a protégé came from his yoke, but my teacher claimed this guy in question could hear anything in his head and play it. And while I don’t doubt that he has extremely well developed ears, I’m not hearing evidence of that on records. Many of his licks sound like worked out formulas and he repeats himself a good bit across albums. He’s still an extraordinary musician.
I know that elite instrumentalists playing a pre-existing composition will hear its notes playing in their minds—as if from a tape—and their fingers make the sound hit their ears an instant later. (I have personally interrogated elite pianists in social settings to learn this.)
I suspect that most “improv” is chained-together pre-existing fragments, but the Greeks thought that truly brilliant work was a Muse whispering in the artist’s ear. The worst improv is what I hear at Guitar Center, where people choose notes from a “box” (a scale).
Perhaps he is an elite instrumentalist (he hears a mental guitar and can play anything), but a weak composer.
Update: Ah, one can test the hypothesis about pre-existing fragments! Take the musician, and play them something new, and have them start playing variations for you, kinda like this famous Mozart work… but don’t jazz cats do that all the time? (I don’t listen to jazz.)
I really think there is only one correct answer to this, and that is… all the picking patterns have to be memorized, dead cold. Numbers of notes per string, exact pickstroke you’re going to use, everything. These little memorized “chunks” become the words of your improvisational language, and you mix and match them as you go.
The chunks depend on the language, i.e. the picking style. Are you doing EJ / Gypsy style improvisation? Well, you better get comfortable with DDU and doing it on all pairs of strings, because it’s one of the most important “words” in your vocabulary. Are you Frank Gambale? Then you better get comfortable with UUD and UUUD, on all strings, because they are two fo the most popular “words” in his style.
Obviously there is a similar process going on in the left hand, and this matches up with the right hand. It’s an ever-expanding memory palace of pre-memorized units.
Again, not the solos, they can be spontaneous. But not at the level of the individual groups of motions. It’s always clear when you’re looking at / listening to someone who has done this homework, i.e. and speaks the language fluently, and someone who really hasn’t.
You can go to any of the Gambale transcriptions we have done, like those really long intro and outro solos (“Ballad”), scan the tablature in a few seconds in SoundSlice, and literally see his entire mechanical vocabulary. The sheer quantity of UUD and UUUD will immediately become obvious. Then there are the combinations of those patterns where they are stacked across different groups of strings. You can think of those like compound words. Then you’ll see all the 2nps “words” like UDUD across pairs of strings. That’s his pure alternate / DSX technique. All of this is memorized.
If you were to count up all the patterns that occur you can pretty much see at a glance everything he’s working with, and in his exact order of preference. i.e. Which patterns occur more frequently, less frequently, and so on. It’s not really that many things to learn. If you get those picking patterns clean and memorized on all strings, you can be as reliably clean as Frank is.
One-way economy styles like Gypsy have the fewest “words” to learn, and are (my guess) more reliably clean as a result. There just aren’t that many patterns to memorize, and the sweeping makes them even easier. Two-way economy styles have more words and take more time to learn. Pure alternate styles like Morse or Andy Wood have the most patterns to learn, and have no sweeping. My guess is that they take the longest to memorize them all, and because they have no sweeping, have a lower hit rate. And that’s provided you can figure out how to do the motions in the first place.
However there is a trade off: you won’t see many fretting patterns in Steve, Andy, Martín, or Molly’s playing similar to what a Gypsy player or Eric Johnson would play. None of those players do Eric’s fives pattern, for example. They are effectively avoiding those types of lines. Why? We can speculate, but my guess is it would just increase the number patterns they would have to memorize to even more weird patterns by including them. And because there is no sweeping, they are less reliable, i.e. the hit rate is lower. So there is a tendency to avoid them.
Ultimateky, it just boils down to how many of these memorized units you have to learn, and then how much time you have spent learning ways to string them all together. Of course, along with all the left hand patterns you would have to memorize. It is always obvious to me who has spent that time, and who is just “winging it” by moving fast and hoping it works out. Which of course isn’t that likely.
The latter has been my overarching approach to improvisation for most of my guitar life. I have always noticed that if I just noodle and let my natural technique take over, without worrying much about making the changes or timing, my lines are usually smooth and clean. And my natural technique is 2wps (USX for ascending lines and DSX for descending lines) and sweeping/economy with those same motions. So mostly Frank Gambale with a dash of Martin Miller and Paul Gilbert.
This is fascinating to me that I was able to naturally come up with picking motions like this without formal training, without copying any of these players’ licks or intensely studying their right hands. It all just came from unguided, fun practice. I understand now how I developed my propensity to use USX on ascending lines and DSX on descending lines - I think it originated from practicing pentatonic scales as fast as I could, and playing this figure at the top
B- 5 8, e - 5 8 5, B - 8 5
I always started alternate picking on downstrokes because I heard from every magazine article and teacher and book that it’s just what you do. So I would ascend in USX to the e string and play that logical pattern, and end up, unbeknownst to me until CtC, in DSX on the way back. It always bewildered me how my pentatonic patterns would end on a down stroke when I got back down to the E string. I knew that couldn’t be right. So I spent the next 15 years staying bewildered and trying to force the idea of one way pickslanting ala my hero John Petrucci and NEVER understanding why I couldn’t hold my hand that way or play phrases like that. In the same way, I used to wonder why I liked starting my sweeping patterns on upstrokes or why I preferred descending sweeps or why my hand would pronate when it was time to play the fastest runs. Now that I have learned I am a 2wps, it all makes sense.
So this of course, is the reason why I’m still not as fluid as I’d like to be with my onstage improv. I’m still trying to recover from almost 2 decades of thinking everything I did was wrong! Or more accurately, I’m still trying to get to the point of having 2wps, economy, sweeping, etc feel correct and automatic for me when playing under the gun.
It’s fascinating to me now after discovering CtC to know that a mortal like me naturally developed a technique that these pros use. It’s just another confirmation that the work you guys are doing is groundbreaking. Not to go on and on about myself, but I wanted to tell that story to let you guys know what kind of work you’re doing. It’s incredible.
This reminds me of what John Mehegan said in his old classic jazz piano books (piano was my first instrument). As the tempo increases, there is more rhythmic complexity, therefore you sacrifice harmonic complexity, by playing simpler chord changes. Or you sacrifice melodic complexity, by playing simpler phrases.
Lord knows there is much focus on speed in these parts, and I do think this is less of a problem at more manageable tempos. Your brain has to have time to process what your mind’s ear would like to play, and then translate to the instrument. Then you throw in the extra decision-making of what strings to play the notes on. (Although note that the piano has to deal with completely different fingerings if you change the key from D to Eb.)
So it’s natural that the higher the tempo, the more we would tend to fall back on lick-based stuff. But for the masters, the thousands of practice hours means not only that their “bag of licks” is bigger, but they can quickly spot similarities to things previously played, in a brand new line.
