Student’s question:
I have started to practice playing the harmonic environments and trying to be very playful with the notes. The problem I face is that when I go higher up in my range I lose track of where I am and I seem to play all the wrong notes. It kind of gets frustrating. Can you give me some advice on how to tackle this problem? Any insight you can provide will be greatly appreciated.
How we think about this in IFR:
This is a wonderful observation. The first thing to realize is that there is only one person in the world who can make you lose your place when you are improvising, and that’s you! And we all have this capacity for getting ahead of ourselves. Even the greatest improvisers in the world can get ahead of themselves and lose focus for a moment.
But we can also prevent this from happening by simply slowing down, being a little more patient with ourselves, and being a lot more diligent about always picturing exactly where we are on our tonal map before moving on. You already have the ability to do this perfectly. But it might help to practice this attitude consciously just to remind yourself what it feels like to have total control of your music.
Thought experiment
Let’s imagine bringing the energy way down, so far down that all you’re doing is playing notes 1 and 2. If you were to improvise over a backing track using just notes 1 and 2, I think you would agree that it would be literally impossible for you to get lost, right?
Okay, so that means the dial is in your hands. If you ever find yourself getting lost, it’s only because you went too fast. You added too many notes, and you stopped thinking clearly about the notes you were playing.
One important point to realize is that staying in control doesn’t prevent you from moving all across your musical range. It’s not really about the quantity of notes you’re playing. It’s about your mental process. Going back to our thought experiment, now imagine moving up from note 2 to note 3. You might play with notes 2 and 3 for a moment. Then you could move up to note 4, perhaps improvising with notes 3 and 4 for a moment. You can keep moving up in this way across your entire range. But every step of the way, you just need to remember to mentally “check in” with each new note, thinking consciously about its tonal number. If you can just relax into this process, you can advance at a pace that doesn’t cause you to get lost.
So just stay mindful and make sure that with each new note you play, you know exactly where you are on your tonal map. And after playing each note, just take a moment to catch your breath and orient yourself. That’s really all there is to it.
So really what this is about is learning to manage your own enthusiasm, and that’s part of learning to improvise. So just embrace the challenge and have fun with it!
