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Recently I noticed I could play what I am singing.
Singing and playing simultaneously sounds like spontaneously.
So it sounds natural, not a lot of thoughts, not impressive but it works good.
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07-18-2023 07:00 AM
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Maybe, you just need to practice being spontaneous to play spontaneously.
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Not a bad idea. Maybe being spontaneous within limitations.
Originally Posted by GuyBoden
Maybe, you just need to practice being spontaneous to play spontaneously.
Sometimes just improvising but setting unusual parameters to get yourself out of the usual patterns can be really really good practice.
String sets are usually really good ones. Like practice improvising (being spontaneous, I guess) but only on the G and E strings, or something.
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Mark,when you play early in the morning,-your house still sleeping- do you have a system in order to turn the camera in front of you and then in profile when playing ?
Or does one of your boys/ girls have to get up at the same time as you to move the camera in real time?
cheers
Emil, alias Hyppolyte Bergamotte
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Spontaneous doesn't mean there's no memory involved, it's merely the absence of premeditation.
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Thats true. If someone tells you to “be spontaneous” they don’t mean you need to do things you’ve never done before. Just do things as the thought strikes, rather than only what you’ve planned for the day. Originally Posted by ragman1
The definitions don’t bother much, I guess.
Right or wrong — players that I think of as “spontaneous” or inventive, are players I can hear reach on a recording. Coltrane’s technique is bananas, but you can still hear him go for an idea and miss. So you get the impression he’s always playing right on the edge of his technical facility. That compares to someone who is super clean and doesn’t make audible mistakes. Right or wrong, the latter always feels more premeditated and less inventive to me.
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The best way I’ve found to work on the improv muscles is what I call listen/sing/play.
put on some solo you don’t know. Play a phrase on the recording. Sing it. If you don’t get it, try again.
when you can sing it, play on guitar
Continue for slotted time slot. Or until you’ve done the solo lol.
Don’t slow down the recording too much. 75% is ok, but keep it flowing, it’s not necessarily about getting every note perfect (but i find if i can sing it I have a better chance) - the main aim is to get your ears and fingers opened up and flexible.
I always play better after doing this for a bit.
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Oh man, I love this. Originally Posted by Christian Miller
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With the horn players, breathing is part of the playing so their lines come out more natural. We can hold our breath and rip off lines that make no sense at all. I've been really trying to breath and use the breath as a way of connecting the notes to by breath patterns. It's been making the "noodling" more natural. Originally Posted by Christian Miller
I also think "noodling" is how my brain assembles intervals and changes. Noodling is the passive side of practice for me, and over time it can create bad habits but more often than not I develop new better habits and sounds. Noodling is like the lab where I use all of the things I've practiced before they are released into the wild.
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nobody’s around. 3 cams on tripods. Originally Posted by Hyppolyte Bergamotte
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This is very inspiring. The way you do it becomes, actually, "making music" (which is the real purpose of picking up an instrument). Now I'm inspired to start every practice session with a 15 minutes free, slow, solo-guitar "follow the arc" improvisation as a warm up. I have tried it, every now and then... but I've eventually fallen into my own muscle-memory driven patterns and clichés ...it can get pretty frustrating when that happens.
I should find a way to "disactivate" (??) my muscle memory and focus on listening to the music in my head. I've unexpectedly managed to do it a few times: like a sudden flow of beautiful, new ideas that I didn't seem to know where they were coming from. It takes, no doubt, quite a bit of practice for that to happen spontaneously, as it were.
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i hope this works for you. 15 minutes can go by very fast when you’re in the zone. You’ve been there before so it’s just a matter of giving yourself the permission to spend more time on this. When I did that it wound out becoming a very time filling journey. I wish you happy explorations! Originally Posted by frabarmus
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What do you think the chances are that I finally realise that whatever goes through my head in the recording process, first take is almost always best?
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Playing spontaneously is like discovering new things-breaking barriers but not playing without sense.
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It depends on what you take into the studio, your own personal awareness, how much access you have to the inspired connection with flow and how much you need to go through to remove the jetsam and flotsam of cliche, habit and nervous space filling finger driven note production in order to find a balanced state of mind. Originally Posted by Christian Miller
Sometimes I need 3 takes to find that space. Sometimes the spectre of perfection is the greatest obstacle in the realization of the moment, which is, in truth comprised of imperfection carefully crafted into intention and design.
Is the first take the best? My glass is raised to you. For me, practice is the process of achieving clarity and coaxing parity with it. For me, thinking of first take vs third take is a distraction. There's an arc towards balance. When it's there, it's there.
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Well you have to prepare the music if it’s hard (or at least I do).
But if it’s not working, doing more of the same won’t help. I’m invariably a terrible judge of my own performances on the day. On reflection, it does usually seem like the first take has the freshness.
I also think listening back to takes is a bad idea. Do two. Move on. Listen back in a few days. I have no idea what you are doing on the day, I’m more or less an idiot. Or rather I am overloaded with subjective on-the-day impressions and all the legitimate stuff I have to worry about on a recording day that I cannot possibly make sensible artistic decisions.
Maybe I’m just very bad at getting out of my own head.
Id love it if I could have zero emotional investment in the outcome of my playing. Just turn up and do it. Maybe listen to the result, maybe not. I reckon we should all aim to play like we punch a clock, like a busy session legends from the 70s or 80s who play a killer solo on some platinum record which to them was just a Tuesday at Union scale. (Who are the players everyone seems to idolise anyway). We do the job as well as we can but afterwards, you shut the door on it.
Obviously you have to listen to the thing if you are mixing it.
im sort of half joking, but only half not joking. I suspect it’s a virtuous circle for the really busy jazz guys, and I notice often my favourite playing of theirs is when they are someone else’s record haha….
I did a session for a podcast soundtrack a few months back and when I finally listened to it, my playing on that is better than anything I’ve released under my own name. The freest, more creative improv I’ve done. It’s not like I wasn’t trying to do a good job, but even on someone else’s project it would have been a different vibe. I’m certain if I did stuff in that spirit more often I’d be much less of a pain in the arse and play better too.
Being busy helps…Last edited by Christian Miller; 07-30-2023 at 07:34 AM.
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The other thing is I’ve found that sometimes things that feel disconnected, contrived, boring or just uninspired as I’m recording actually come across really well once I listen back much later.
I used to record every single gig and obviously like everyone, sometimes at the time I thought a gig went really well, totally in the flow, another gig really bad, couldn’t get in the zone, bad sound etc and everything in between. I kept it all anyway. I had hundreds of them, years of stuff.
Sometimes I go back and listen at random. I’ve forgotten all of those impressions and I honestly can’t tell the difference. You know obviously sometimes I can tell if I make a mistake on an arrangement or something, but when it comes to the improv, I never can tell if it was a good night or a bad night. For a given period of my playing it all sounds fairly consistent.
That was a good lesson, I thought.
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Two rules of thumb: If you had a good take, don't listen. If you had a bad take, don't listen. Originally Posted by Christian Miller
Ha ha, for me, I practice fucking up. Then when I do mess up, I feel "Yeah. I meant to do that!"
I say that in jest but seriously too. Jazz is not about what you wind up with, it's about the ability to create it.
It's that acquired skill to take the unexpected jagged boulder that falls in front of you and instantly frame it into an exciting part of the exciting journey. It's turning the objects of disaster into the unexpected and ultimately, welcomed mechanisms of inspiration. That takes craft. It only becomes art in the retrospect.
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man, this post and what you said earlier! I find myself agreeing with everything you say! Originally Posted by Jimmy blue note
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