Like I explained a long time ago before, improvisation is the most overlooked technique in music whether either playing live on the stage or in the studio. I think the reason is that a lot of musicians don’t understand improv. A lot of musicians find it too difficult for them. I’m not the best at improv yet but I wanna be someday and am working on it, practicing my ear training skills. My goal is to one day become an improv master on guitar! Whether you agree with it or not, improv is the most important part of music. So many bands don’t wanna write songs or play guitar solos in that way. That’s why I prefer to mostly listen to a lot of jam band stuff and rock n’ roll from the 70’s ’cause they did all the improv work in their music. That’s why I love bands such as the Dead, Phish, Led Zep, Hendrix, etc. Bands that just simply love to jam.

Why bands shouldn’t really ignore improvisation??? I can think of 5 reasons…

• Improv will make you better musicians – When you get up to that point when you can play everything you hear that is when you’ll be ready to be called an actual musician. You’ll get more respect from other musicians around you too if you can follow everything they’re doing.
• It makes music more unpredictable and more interesting – I can’t stand written guitar solos ’cause you already know what’s going to come up ahead. If you improvise stuff and wing it out, you’ll never know what’s coming. Whatever comes from your mind and from the heart. That’s why I prefer to listen to a lot of virtuoso guitar players ’cause they are all unpredictable guitar players.
• It makes live performances even more fun – Longer solos and more jamming will for sure, put a thrill to your audience at a gig. A lot of people make assumptions that people get bored at really long solos. Not exactly true. As long as you can play guitar really well, they won’t mind the long solo jams and the audience will stick through them as long as the solos are musical and tasteful.
• You don’t have to sing much – The best part of long jamming and improv is that you don’t have to sing a whole lot. It’ll give you a nice break from the vocals. If you listen to jam band music and rock n’ roll from the 70’s… you would notice they don’t write too many lyrics in their songs ’cause all they wanna do is jam most of the time.
• It’s just an important technique that all musicians should do – Improv is an important technique ’cause if you wanna become a professional musician, you gotta know some improv. If you don’t know anything about it, then you’re screwed. There are way too many musicians out there playing in bands who don’t know anything about improv, they just write everything beforehand. If you play with other musicians and then they start playing for no reason, you get lost, what are you gonna do? This is why you have to learn to train your ears. When you get out there playing music with other professionals, other musicians are gonna expect you to have a good ear.

I’m trying the best I can to become that kind of guitar player. Ear training is pretty challenging. It takes years to have a good ear, it doesn’t happen over night. You have to memorize the sound of each note in your head and it’s tough to do. The key to getting good at ear training is knowing what the intervals sound like. After you memorize the sound of the intervals, you’ll be able to play just about anything.

I know bands just wanna get together and play but telling everybody what chords to play or what key to play in is not the way to do it in my opinion. Bands would just get together and play songs right off the bat just out of jamming on them. Just start playing and off you go. I respect bands who can play like that. Who just get together and play just about anything and everything. They don’t just sit down writing stuff on paper. They just rock out!

I love improv music. That’s what I prefer to listen to the most. It’s why I love to listen to a lot of live albums ’cause they are more exciting to listen to than studio albums.

Kev