5 Likes
Super fun conversation with an awesome player. Sorry for the delay on this – this was a few years ago at this point, but we’re motoring on our backlog. If you’ve followed Roy in the mean time, you can see he’s leveled up on his writing and improvising, even beyond the obviously high level in the interview. A quick scan through just a few things on his Instagram is just a buffet of awesome ideas and slick playing.
A good portion of this conversation is about improvisation and how Roy workshops it. It’s not super academic in terms of memorizing harmonies and scale shapes. It’s more about continually trying to create lines on the fly, then stopping to etude the novel ideas when they emerge. It’s almost the reverse of the etude-first approach most of us use.
Obviously he must have done some of the more memorization-heavy stuff at one point, and there is no shortage of ideas for learning these kinds of things. Or maybe he doesn’t – maybe it’s just folded into the process we outline in the talk, on an as-needed basis. But the less-talked-about part of this is how you actually learn to find those notes on the fretboard and connect them together on the fly during real-world playing. And that’s what we spend most of our time on in the conversation. A lot of great stuff in there.
3 Likes