Stop 5 of 5
Your first improvisation
Phrases, space and repetition over a blues.
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Stop 5 of 5
Phrases, space and repetition over a blues.
This is the moment that gives the whole stage its meaning: you are going to improvise your first solo. You don't need more notes than the five in box one, nor more technique than you already have. What you need is a way of thinking: play short phrases, leave space, repeat and vary your ideas and end at home. With those four tools, a whole blues becomes your conversation.
Listen to this solo opening. It lasts six bars, but there are only three ideas: a phrase, the same phrase with a different ending, and a new phrase that goes back home. Between them, silence.
Does it seem too simple? Listen again, imagining the backing underneath and a voice singing those phrases. It sounds like music because it makes sense: each idea has a beginning and an end, and the listener has time to take it in before the next one.
Improvising isn't playing at random, nor showing how many notes you know. It's speaking with a vocabulary you already have. Just as you don't recite the dictionary when you talk, you don't recite the scale when you improvise: you choose a few words and say them with intent.
A good way to think of a musical phrase is as a sentence. Notes are the words, short silences are the commas and arriving on the root is the full stop.
Three simple rules for your first phrases:
The most common mistake when you start improvising is never stopping. Silence isn't a gap to be filled: it gives the notes their value, just as the spaces between words make a text readable. In a blues, silence also lets the band be heard and gives you time to think of your next phrase.
A rule to train it: play two bars, rest two. During the silent bars, listen to the backing and prepare your next idea, ideally singing it in your head.
Listening is largely recognising. When you hear an idea a second time you recognise it and follow it; if nothing ever repeats, the listener gets lost. That's why good solos repeat ideas and then vary them: repetition brings coherence, variation brings surprise.
We start from a short idea, which we'll call A:
And now four ways to vary it without losing its identity:
In composition, a short idea that is repeated and transformed is called a motif, and transforming it is developing it. The technique is as old as written music, and it's used by everyone from classical composers to blues guitarists.
The A – A′ – B structure fits the blues naturally: the first four bars present an idea (A), the next four repeat it with changes (A′) and the last four bring something new that closes (B). It's the same logic as many traditional blues lyrics, where a line is sung, repeated, and answered with a third.
The clearest way to end a phrase is to land on the root. Box one has three roots, low, middle and high, and you should be able to reach all of them:
Not every phrase should end on the root: if they all close, the solo sounds like a list of conclusions. As in the previous stop, mix open phrases (ending on D, E or G) with closing phrases on A. A good habit is to end on the root at the end of each four-bar block, and always at the end of the chorus.
The right notes at the wrong time sound like mistakes. While you improvise, the pulse is the ground you stand on: never lose it. Three habits help:
Before the full solo, listen to how a 12-bar chorus built from this stop's ideas might sound: A in bars 1-4, A′ in bars 5-8 and B in bars 9-12, closing on the root. Listen, then play it; it's an example, not a required model.
Start the backing. In bars 1-2 play a phrase; in bars 3-4, total silence (your foot keeps tapping the pulse). Repeat the scheme through the whole blues. Each phrase can have five notes at most.
Goal: Go through two whole choruses of the blues alternating two bars of phrase and two of silence, without losing count of the bars.
Create your own idea A of three to five notes. During one chorus of the blues, play it with the four variations from "Repeat and vary", leaving a bar of silence between each. If you particularly like one variation, keep it: that's how are born.
Goal: Make up a one-bar idea and play it in four versions (same, new rhythm, new ending, new strings) over the backing.
Use the same backing as in "Two bars on, two bars off".
Record yourself on your phone and listen back: do the phrases make sense? Is there space? Does bar 11 sound like an ending? Don't aim for perfection: aim for something that sounds like conversation.
Goal: Improvise three 12-bar choruses in a row with A, A′, B form, ending each chorus on a long root in bar 11.
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