Learning to improvise? Check out my book, How To Really Play The Piano: www.billspianopages.com/how-t...
Piano improvisation doesn’t have to be as difficult as it seems. If you use the right techniques to practise your improvisations you’ll make progress quickly. A lot of it comes down to splitting down the various tasks your brain has to carry out as you improvise. Many of these are tasks that are essential to playing the piano anyway, like reading chords or thinking about hitting the right notes in right and left hands. You can develop your piano improvisation skills more effectively if, during your practice time at the keyboard, you use specific techniques reduce the number of tasks you’re trying to do at the same time.
If you're a complete beginner at improvisation, the secret of getting into started is actually quite simple - you just have to restrict yourself to a small number of notes and gradually build the number of notes you use as you grow in confidence. By a small number I mean as few as just one or two. Just play with, for example, C and E, and focus on rhythmic improvisation to begin with, and gradually build out from there. It’s a trick to getting good at improvisation is to take it in baby steps - two notes, then three notes, then for notes and so on. And I mean take it really gradually - you might find that you manage three, four or five note improvisation relatively quickly, but after that your progress will slow down, because you’ve got more notes to deal with and you will have to start doing things like changing your hand position if it takes a few weeks to get to the point where you can use a full pentatonic scale spanning an octave - and I only mean quite slowly - don’t think that there is something wrong; that’s the kind of time I would expect it to take you.
As always on the piano, the secret to making progress is to challenge yourself, but if at any stage you feel the challenge is too much, you’re just freezing up, reduce the difficulty by using techniques like the one I describe in this tutorial.
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