Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hey, I'm Jack. I play the violin and I'm a musician in
Northern New Mexico. I want to teach
you improvisation, specifically melodic
improvisation. What does that mean,
melodic improvisation. I haven't heard it a lot. Melodic improvisation
is taking melody first, learning melody, and then
improvising from that melody. Improvising is really
my favorite thing to do on my instrument. And it's the thing that helps
me connect to all sorts of different musicians from
different musical styles and express my inner voice. So I want to teach you how
to find that inner voice and give you some techniques to help you on your
way to get there. Melodic improvisation means
we're starting from melody. We're going to learn
a melody together. A short little,
short little melody, not very hard, just
has four notes. And then we're going to go
a lot of places from there. We're going to go away. And then when I come
back to that melody, I grew up playing in orchestras and grew up playing
classical music. I went to conservatory and I got a degree from UC Berkeley, where I transitioned to learning Free jazz and a
different sorts of jazz. Since then I've
traveled the world and played folk music
and world music. And I currently live in
Northern New Mexico, where I plan a folk band and I teach as well as
do film scoring. So throughout all my travels and all of my musical explorations, the one thing that's
allowed me to connect with all these different
musicians and to find it an amazing compositional
basis is improvisation. And that's why I think
it's so important. Because anyone can improvise and you can improvise with
a small amount of tools. You don't need the
utmost knowledge of theory or knowing
1 million scales, you just need to use your
ears and listen both to what is out there in the world and how
you can respond to it. And what's inside yourself, and how you can try
and channel it. What we're gonna
do in this class is I'm going to try and give you some tools to channel that inner feeling
and some tools to listen to the outside world
and try and take that, internalize it and channel
it through your instrument.
2. Class Project and Outline: Melody is the most
accessible way of finding yourself in
this world of music. Because it is something that's repeated and it's something
that is innately musical. It's expressing
something already. I think this is a great
starting place for us because you want to be playing
music from the first time. Even if you're a very beginner, you want that experience of
playing music because it's the most joyful thing in
the world to play music. And why should we not
have that until later? Start with that, start with that melody creation
from that joyful place. And then you can go 1 million different places from there, because this class is
aimed towards beginners, but it does assume some things. One of those things being, you know, some note names, like, you know what your open
strings are called. And maybe you know
what the first finger on one of your strings is
or your second finger. And that you have
a little bit of fluency with the scale a, B, C, D, E, F, G,
back-and-forth, right? That's knowing that those are the musical notes that we use. This class can be
for any instrument, although stringed
instruments and then more specifically
bowed instruments, are probably going to find this the most helpful
because at certain times I'm going to be doing
specific bot techniques, right-hand techniques. And if you play an instrument
that doesn't use a bow, it probably won't be helpful. But conceptually, it when we're talking about
melodic improvisation, using melody to create other
composition spontaneously. Any musician can use this. A lot of the learning
that we're gonna be doing in this class is oral learning. It's learning by ear. Across the world. I've
played and learn folk music with musicians who come from wildly different
backgrounds. And the way that unites us is that we can
all learn by ear. So this is something that maybe it takes a
little bit of practice if you haven't done it before. But it is a natural sort of human learning style to
learn something by year. I'm not going to have a lot
of written notated notes, but there will be some that I'll put on the
screen for those of you who are more comfortable
learning with written notes. So anyone can improvise. You can improvise, even if
you've never done it before. And let's get going. Let's start by tuning
our instruments and start slowing our body down and listen to the
world around us.
3. Tuning Exercise - Opening Your Ears: All right everyone, welcome
to the first video. So we're going to
tonight and instruments, and we're going to
use tuning as a way of sort of sewing our body down. Listening to
ourselves, listening to all the overtones that
your violin can make, or your cello, your
retiree or viola. So let's start with
that open strings. Just getting tuning with your fine tuners or with
your tuner in front of you. Just listening to the tones and the beautiful open sounds
that you're violet can make. So let's just do that
for as long as it takes for you to
slow down a little bit and get more in tune with your instrument and with how your instrument interacts
with the world around you. Whether that's outside,
whether that's your dining room,
your living room. And how does the sound
bounce off the walls? Is one string more
resonant than the others? Is one string feeling a
little dead in the space. What do you hear? So this is a really good way
to start training your ear and opening your ear and
incorporating your body. Start listening your instrument
the way it really sounds, the way it really rings. So let's do that for 20 s plus, as long as you want. Have some really long bows. You can go back and
forth a little bit. Playing double star,
string ring together. How do they sound? Ring dealer? Do you hear the little, that little pulse when your strings are a little bit out of tune. Then when you take your
ball off the stream, what sound is left? Right? Can you hear the
resonance in the room? So this is just a
good little exercise. It's both useful in the
fact that you're tuning your instrument and it just
slows you down a little bit. Alright, So next video, we're gonna learn
the initial melody. We're going to learn it by ear. And then we're going to
start improvising and always off of that melody.
4. Learn the Melody!: So here is our melody
starting points. A little piece I made
up for us to work from. And to start at. We're going to learn this
and then we're going to break it down so you can find a little
bit more freedom from this point of melody. You can just use the
techniques that we learned in the
next couple videos as ways to expand play with answer melodies
that you come up with. We're gonna be
building and changing this melody and hopefully
find a new starting place. That's mostly what a lot
of improvisation is, is just building from melody. I think that it's helpful
to start with melody instead of starting
with chords or scales. Although we are going to be working in a pentatonic scale, which I will explain.
Melody is music. Melody is something
that you can feel. It's something that
is expressive. You can shape it. It's something that gives
you also information because there are notes and
the notes or the information, then you can start
changing those notes, changed some and
not change others. And this sort of
changing process, but still having a very basic
starting, starting point. That is, what can lead
you to different places, whether it's finding
a new composition or finding a cool line, that's an improvisation line. And again, I'm going to break it down first
into the first measure, which is four notes, starting on D, third
finger on a string. Separated beause. I'm doing them in the top half of my bot. You could do them differently. Here. Let's do it again. Next phrase. That is G-natural, F-Natural, D. You could also do
them separated. Let's try that again.
One more time. Now it's combined first
and second phrases. Great, let's do
it one more time. Ready? 12, ready, go. In the last little tag, going down to C natural than d. So let's go from the
middle phrase to the end. So that'll be starting on the
E string on G-natural 12. Ready? Go. Do one more time. Ready? Let's try those
whole phrase. 12. Ready, go. Rhythm is, the second part. Is Kafka. Kafka, little swing in there. I think it's easiest if you
just play along with me. As I do this, I'm trying to count
out all the rhythms, get the information to your
fingers into your bot. Try playing it over and over. Try playing it with me, without me if, and keep
rewinding the video playing. And I think you'll
learn it pretty quick. So I'll do it one more time. 12. Ready? Go. Repeat it. Okay, Happy Learning. And see you in the next video, we're going to start
breaking it apart.
5. Question and Answer With Our Melody: Okay, so we have our melody. Here. It is 2 bar for, for swung eighth notes, which means the eighth
notes is a little bit. This is a great pattern
for us to learn, is low. Let's, let's practice
a little bit of those swung eighth
notes as long, short, long, short,
long, short long. Using a little bit of bow, because we're going to use those swung eighth notes a lot. So having that as
another tool in our arsenal and
having our melody, we want to answer our melody. I think of this melody
as sort of a question. Something comes after
it's completed. It's, it's sort of left there for us to wonder
what comes next. And this concept of question-and-answer
comes from the blues, which is the base
of all jazz music, African-American
folk art form that developed into jazz and the blues is a lot about
question-and-answer. You have a phrase and then
you answer that phrase. So how can we
answer this phrase? That feels answered?
So what did I do? I just made that up. And I'm hoping you can make
something up to. And what I do is I take the
notes that I've been playing, the melody notes we have d, we have G natural, we have F-Natural,
we have C-natural. And then we have back to D. And then I say, where
are those notes? In other places
on my instrument, I have opened d, I have open G. I have seen natural down
here and down here. And I have F-Natural
here, right here. So pick two of those notes. I'm going to pick D and G.
And I'm just going to use my swung eighth note pattern to answer my original melody. So here's one. There's a lot of
combinations of these notes. And as you can see, I'm
changing the rhythm to sort of come to
a settling point. I want to come to a
place where I have question and the answer
is a period, right? The answer says, Oh,
that's the phrase. The way that you can do that is having your faster
swung eighth notes. Then a longer last note. What I would love for
you to practice is repeating this in
a sort of cycle. So you're always coming back
to your original melody. But you're using those
same notes of the melody, but putting them in
different places and envisioning
different rhythms. That can become the closing of a phrase. And
you can loop this. Once you close the phrase,
then you can go back to the beginning
and start again. I'll demonstrate a
couple of times. So you see each time
that you come back, you have a period of your
phrase and then you come back, it starts a new feeling, right? So you can keep
looking at this and then you start making
a little song, right? You have your
refrain and you have your answer or your question, and then your answer. And each time the
question can be posed differently and the answer can be posed differently, which leads you to
the next question, which can also be in
a different feeling. So I'm going to leave
this up to you with how long that your
answer wants to be. I've been usually keeping it
within 2 bar more or less. And I'm keeping a
little bit of a rhythm. You can be free with how long
your answer wants to be, but just remember, just use the notes that you
already have in your melody. It's a lot of information
to work with and try and place them different places
around your instrument.
6. Tone Poems: Okay, So now that you've practiced a little bit
of question answer, which is Melody creating. Let's get a little abstract with breaking
this melody down. And this is something
that I learned during my free improvisation
explorations there. And it's called tone poems. So it takes the notes
that you have, right? We have to keep repeating. So we have d, we have G natural,
we have F-Natural. We have seen natural. And if you can write them out there right
here, written out, then you just think
of those notes as separate entities that can be moved around in all
different places. We can start on C,
we could start on F, we could start anywhere. And so take the
rhythm out of it. So take long bows and
start arranging these. And start thinking, what
does your ear here? You want to be listening
really hard to yourself. And you want to be just
listening to what's the impulse of your body where
the next note should be? This is a great exercise to slow everything down again and start listening to your surroundings, to what's inside your body
and your creative spirit, and what's your instrument
is telling you. You just take these notes and just play with
them in any order. But before you play
them, the next note, give yourself time
to think about that impulse of what
the next note might be. And really only move when you feel a really
strong impulse to move. I'll try it a little bit here. Starting, I'll start on C. You can see that I'm
moving very slowly with the intention
of having long bows. But sometimes I
get the impulse to move back and forth, right? You can go back and
forth and I can move a little bit
faster on some. And that gives us
direction to our melody. It gives us, where's it going
and why is it doing that? I would love if you can try
that just a little exercise. What note stick out to you. And then for
compositional purposes, if you find that
you're going back and forth between two nodes, cannot be the start of
a new melody, right? If I'm going back and forth
between D and an F natural, that is a new question
that needs to be answered. Right? So we can start
with our tone poem, which starts
rearranging the notes that we've just learned, slowing ourselves down and
getting ourselves to listen. Then we can start a whole new process of
questioning and answering. As you can see, I was only still using the
notes of our melody. I think it's really good
to just keep trying to use these four notes
because it gives you some limitations of your
improvisation and gives you some structure where you
can start and where to be. Okay, this exercise is writing all these notes out or seeing
them on the screen start, starting from different places, slowing down, playing
really slowly. And if you get the
impulse right, going back and forth
to some notes and then see what the next
question is that you create, do you create a new melody? And then from there, what is the next answer? And keep using these
notes, these four nodes.
7. Expression: Right Hand vs. Left Hand: We're going to talk
about expression now. What does expression? It is? All of the feeling of music. And how do you get that? Well, I'm going to
break it up into two pieces, two videos. We're going to talk
about right hand, and then we're gonna
talk about left hand. I'll go quickly
conceptually first, those of you who don't
play bowed instrument. The right-hand video might
not be super helpful for you because it's gonna
be very specific to those of us who use
about expression. Is everything, is
all the music stuff. It is. It is what makes music music. Your fingers here, your
left hand, fingers. They're just little soldiers and you tell them what
to do and they do it. They're a little mechanical
things that you can practice. Scales, arpeggios, all different
kinds of variations on that to get your finger mobility
to a really great place. And that's just mechanical. Your bow hand. It's mechanical. It's more complex. And everything that
you do realize on your bot and the
way that your bot moves in the strokes
that you choose, the bot is the most important
part of expression. It makes the expression
and it produces the emotion that you may be feeling and makes the
instruments sound. So we're gonna go
through a couple of different bow strokes that
you can add to your arsenal.
8. Right Hand Bow Strokes: Main Boeing's, we're
going to have legato, really long and slow. Martele, which is a, all of these are Italian terms. By the way, Martele is detached. Boeing has some accents on it on either side of
the points of the bow. And then we have trehalose and rolling our bot
over the strings. And then we can also even
use the word of our bot. These are like the miscellaneous like texture stuff we can plan the bridge creates
a certain texture because way down here. So you can use all sorts of different parts of your
instrument to improvise. So legato, legato is long
connected, continuous. My sound going as long as I can. And even when I change my bot, There's sound that
continues, right? And I want it to be
using a lot of bot. This sort of leads itself to big emotions, romantic playing. You really like, wow, pouring your heart
out with the sound. The more bow you use, the more sound
you're going to use. So you can practice that
playing her melody. Playing it with really
long legato bows. Okay, the next bow
strokes we're going to talk about Martele
and also datasheet, which is just detached. And there are two
different forms of detached Boeing's, right? I think the chez is more it has a little
bit more connection between the nodes. Right? In this I'm moving my bow hand, my right hand faster, right? I'm pushing a little bit from my shoulder into the string to create
a little more sound. Or you never want to be
pushing from your hand. You want to be pushing
from your whole body so you're not
tensing any muscles? Every part of my hand and my arm is very loose and relaxed. And I can still get a lot of power and sound into my string, but it comes from really my
shoulders and my upper body. Days has Shane and
Martele a little more accented form of
that where you also, I'm still in the
upper half of my bot. And if you go down, you can even do this in the lower half. And being in the lower half of your Grupo gives a completely
different character. It's much more like rough
and rockets, right? But I started here in
the middle of my box. And I give a little accent. I'm pushing. I have a
little more of a push. If I think there's a point
here and a point here when I'm going up and
down bow, right, stop, stop because I'm stopping my bot between these points. These points have an accent.
9. Left Hand - Learn the Pentatonic Scale : So let's talk about the
left hand and right. As I said before,
a very mechanical, more applicable to
all instruments, although the spacing is wildly different
between instruments, whether it's violin or
viola or cello, guitar, you guys are lucky because
you guys got frets, so you don't have to figure
out if you're in tune or not. We are going to talk about
is the pentatonic scale. And the reason for this
is the melody that we've learned has four notes
of a pentatonic scale. That's a D pentatonic. And I know that I said
this class was not about learning skills and
learning chords. So far. We haven't really, but
we'll have to learn notes. These notes are part
of something bigger. And that's why we can talk
about chords is because we have this melody with these particular nodes
that belong somewhere. They belong in chords. And the pentatonic scale is very important for jazz music. And you can really just improvise if you know a pentatonic scale and
you're playing in that key. So let's learn this
pentatonic scale, D, F, a, C, and D. Right? And then we can extend it up octaves and come
all the way down. Up to this extensive or a whole instruments. Are Melody has
every note of that and just having
scale except for a. And that's the only
node that we added. You've already been playing this pentatonic scale and your ears sort of
already adjusted to it. Why are we talking about
the pentatonic scale? Now we have this pattern that we can use in improvisation. It's just another tool
in our arsenal, right? It's another tool to
play with the melody.
10. Left Hand - Create Licks: We're going to incorporate
this pentatonic scale as another tool in our
arsenal to create melody. We always have to
remember to come back to the concept that you're
creating melody and you're creating music
in your improvisation. It's not just the scale
going up and down. So how can we make this, this pentatonic scale musical? With appendix, tonic scale
and learning those notes, you can create little patterns that go back and forth and you can start moving faster because your fingers know exactly
where to go, right? Because you're not
going to be playing, at least right now. All the nodes in-between. You can just be playing. D, F, G. You can go up and down. Little. Scale. Starts slow. I just
do one octave on, starting on open D. And can
you start getting faster? And you can start
putting more bows, more rhythmic elements
onto each of these nodes. And this is going to work
out your hand a little bit. If you start going
faster and faster, it's just about where just
putting those fingers down and then getting that muscle memory and you great exercise
going back-and-forth. Coming down from the
D. Just three notes. And then we started adding
a little bit of right hand. And we can start swinging. Right? Remember our
swung eighth notes. Long, short, long, short, long, short gang. This
circular motion. Now we're going to
play coming down. Okay, and now let's combine
going up and coming down. Then you can go back
to your melody. So this working out of
the left hand through the pentatonic scale,
as we're doing, creates a whole nother dimension of both rhythm and
melodic variation. And I would call this a little
bit more of ornamentation. Because when you're
going back-and-forth, that's more, that's a
statement and you're saying something but
it informs the melody. So we'd call these licks
when you're different. And just sprinkle them into your improvisation between
the melody elements. So the melody is always
what we're coming back to. But when we have these other
more rhythmic elements, both with our left hand
and with our right hand. Then we can start even building our improvisation more
and going further places. I'd love for you to practice is the pentatonic scale
with the left hand. And start just one octave. And try and get
faster and faster. Once you're comfortable
with these notes, then you can start. You can start going up above the octave and
below the octave, or you have C and a. Once you practice that, you get a little more
comfortable going back and forward on all
of your strings, but the pentatonic notes of the scale then start
making little licks. What licks can you make? And then I went down. You can go across, you can go diagonal, right? You can go any way that
you're using these notes. Pick three of them and
make a little lick.
11. Working with Visual Score : Alright, so we've done some right-hand technique and we've done some left
hand technique. These are more tools
for your arsenal. These are more tools to draw
from in your improvisation. Let's figure out
how to use them. And I think a cool way
of contextualizing these ideas is to
use a visual aid. And we're going to use this
Kandinsky painting as, sort of as a visual score
to help us figure out what role the right
hand and what role the left hand technique place. We're also going to look at
foreground and background. This is really important when
you're playing with people. What's in the front
and what's in the bag. It's also a helpful thing
to think about when you're creating music by herself and
maybe you're producing it. And you think about
what's the bed of sound that's foreground
and background is a helpful thing to think about
when you are both playing with people and also when you might be producing
music on the computer. And you think about what's in the front and
what's behind it, and how do you play
with those things? How do you create textural
elements that maybe will be the background and
the melody part that will be the foreground. So let's look at this painting. Painting by the
abstract expressionists Wassily Kandinsky. There's all these shapes
that we can choose from here to inform some
improvisation. What can we color and what are those colors
bring up in you? What color does, what does the color red
inspire you to play? What does the color blue
inspired you to play? What does the color brown
inspire you to play? What is the shape of a circle
inspire you to play it, or the shape of a triangle. For me, I think a lot about what is in the foreground and what
isn't the background, e.g. that square, that orange square is in the
background of that triangle. And it's not very clearly
delineated in the sense of, it's not, I don't see it
as a super pointy thing. I see it more as
a color texture. So in this instance, I would use my right hand. I would use my bowing techniques as more of a textural element, creating something
like brushy to, for something else to come
over and lay over, right? If, if I was thinking
of playing as me as this square and someone
else has this triangle. I would create a little, a little texture for
this bigger triangle, this bigger brown
triangle to go over. In terms of the left hand, I think of more
directionality of lines. I think of these
squiggles waves on the, on this painting as having
a certain line to it. So then I can put a link
to those lines, right? That sounds like right. And I also use my right hand to inform the expression
of that rate. If it's a wavy thing, I'm gonna be using slurs. Whereas if I want to play that red triangle
that's at the top, I might use more
pointed bows and more pointed left hand as I think that each point of
that triangle is a note. And then the line that connects those those points
is what my bot does. So these are just
improvisational ideas and ways of thinking that can inform your improvisation
and where forgot what techniques you use in terms of foreground
and background. A lot of times you're bowing. We'll create the
texture element. Whereas your fingers will
create the direction elem. Checkout this red line that's overlaid by a
lot of little circles. I see that line as going up, as having a direction Up. So if that's the direction up, I might play my
fingers going up. And it's going a little
bit to the sides, a little off-center,
it's not straight up. So if I think about my strings
as directional vectors, basically, my string as
just one straight line up. I can go over to
this other string. Instead of playing just straight
up a scale on a string, I can go over to my east thing. Then that creates a little
bit of a sideways direction. Just thinking about it
purely mechanically of the directions that
your strings are going. You just change the direction a little bit and change string. So if you think about
this foregrounding in backgrounding and using the
techniques like a painting. Then you have a lot at your disposal already
with your toolbox of techniques to start putting
music to this painting.
12. Final Project Explained: We've done a lot. We've learned our melody. We slowed down, started listening
to the world around us. We started to interpret
some colors into feelings. We've learned a lot of different bowing
techniques and given you some pentatonic scale practice
to put into your arsenal. And now, how do you
improvise with all that? We can't do everything
at the same time. So we're going to pick
a couple of elements and put them in
different contexts. For our final class project, I'm going to provide you with two different ways to
improvise and you can choose or do both of these
go either direction. One direction will be a
sound bed or a drone, which will be a
textured sound world, remaining the D tonality. So you can play all of the pentatonic scale
that we learned, our melody and start
exploring with that. And that'll be a little bit
of a more of a tone poem based improvisation that
you can go wild with. You can be free with the rhythm. You can try and create
question-and-answer in a slower and more free way. Then the second option
that I'm going to give you is a beak that I just made on logic that goes with the melody that
we've been playing. This will involve more of
logic-based improvisation. Swinging your eighth notes, also playing
question-and-answer. But when you're inside time, when you're inside that beat, all this stuff is going to
happen probably a little bit faster than what we've
been practicing. So you have these two options and it doesn't have to
become clear that you can just turn in your
straight-up improvisation and say which one
you did it with. And hopefully it'll
be a piece of music, a small little piece
of music that involves melody that we can
all listen to. So that's been a great
pleasure during this class. I'll do a little
walk-through of sampling, both the sound world drone
and the beat improvisation. And I'll walk you
through and narrate how I improvise while
I'm doing this.
13. Drone Improvisation Narration: All right, I'm going
to narrate you through and play a
little bit of pink. Now I'm just playing the
melody and really slowly creating a little slow 3-node. Sounds. Pretty common. One when I started wondering. That's fine.
14. Beat Improvisation Narration: Okay, let's start with
the beat improvisation. Swing knows. Just using notes from
the pentatonic scale. Another melody, a
little movie of itself. Listen to the drum meals to changes a little
bit with the fills. I react to that, right?
I'm listening to that.
Jack Boaz, Violinist, Songwriter, Composer
