How to Improvise And Compose Music

In One Sentence

Obsession and singing. You need to pick a piece of music you would enjoy listening to hundreds of times because this is what you need to do in order to hear out all the nuances. There are no shortcuts.

4 hours condensed into 10 seconds

People tend to approximate the product rather than attacking it in a realistic, true way at any elementary level — regardless of how elementary — but it must be entirely true and entirely real and entirely accurate. They would rather approximate the entire problem than to take a small part of it and be real and true about it. To approximate the whole thing in a vague way gives you a feeling that you’ve more or less touched the thing, but in this way you just lead yourself toward confusion and ultimately you’re going to get so confused that you’ll never find your way out.

It is true of any subject that the person that succeeds in anything has the realistic viewpoint at the beginning and knows that the problem is large and that he has to take it a step at a time and that he has to enjoy the step-by-step learning procedure. They’re trying to do a thing in a way that is so general that they can’t possibly build on that. If they build on that, they’re building on top of confusion and vagueness and they can’t possibly progress. If you try to approximate something that is very advanced and don’t know what you’re doing, you can’t advance. ~ Bill Evans

Does relative pitch work for complicated chords?

I was blown away by this video.

Steps

1. Develop a very good ear with ear training. It helps to listen to music through some good reference headphones that have a wide soundstage. I personally use the AKG K702 which I got used for $80.
   1. You want to get to a point where your hands and instrument are just an extension of your mind. Lack of ability can break the flow making it difficult to improvise.
   2. How to figure out piano chord progressions while playing?
2. Listen to music and identify cells (riffs, voicings, melodies,…)
   1. It is very important to be able to extract these sounds on the spot when they are resonating the most with you. In my experience, making music depends a lot on the space I inhabit and the mood I am in. A lot of my frustration came from not being able to translate the sound I hear in my mind to the instrument.
   2. Use a program like Transcribe! to loop specific sections and slow down playback
      1. https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/111636/how-useful-is-spectrum-analysis-when-transcribing-music
      2. ear training - Tips or ways to bring out hard-to-hear parts of songs - Music: Practice & Theory Stack Exchange
3. Practicing means to apply new concepts to your own improvisations and compositions. Push it to its limits and discover what is possible.

Rhythmic Displacement

Let’s observe how Barry Harris uses rhythmic displacement in Ladybird to add some swing.

Jazz Standards

• My Foolish Heart
• Peace Piece
• The Nearness of You
  • https://www.pianogroove.com/jazz-piano-lessons/the-nearness-of-you-tutorial/

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What songs should I play when testing a guitar on a store? : r/Guitar

Great players don’t play much. They play simple stuff and listen. They stick to simple, familiar chords and passages to hear and feel the instrument and to give a base line for what the guitar is and does.