“How can I improve my improvising, even though I listen to a lot of jazz and blues artists?”

“I have trouble coming up with different patterns.”

(Learns “a lot” of music by ear)

(Practices 5 days/week)

(playing for 5 years)

(Knows 2 major scales)

(Has the Maiden Voyage book)

-Ishmael, VA

My response:

Imagine you are learning Spanish. Do you come up with your own words and patterns? Or do you learn words and patterns that already exist?

Music exists and you can play music as well as adding your own voice.

With Spanish, people do come up with new phrases that can be beautiful, powerful, poetic. Speeches, literature, music, etc have unique phrases.

Listening

Listening is great and it’s good that you listen. But it’s not enough. You can sometimes learn things by only listening, but you learn much faster if you listen then try something out then listen again and change it and repeat that cycle. “Learning by ear” and “transcribing” (writing down what you learn by ear) really help you develop as a saxophone player.

Copying

The people who give speeches, write literature, and compose lyrics though are masters of language. They have learned from others in the process of creating on their own. They have influences, most likely starting with their parents.

I’m not saying this to discourage you from improvising. However, it does seem like you may have overlooked the importance of copying from others. Your goal is not to sound exactly like someone else in twenty years, it’s to be able to learn from great musicians and be able to sound like them when you would like. You gradually form your own sound and style.

10,000 patterns?

You can start simply with phrases that really fit into the music. I would rather hear one really good song than a thousand terrible songs.

Similarly with improvisation, start with a few phrases. Learn them from your favorite saxophone players. Play around with them. Make them fit into the songs you want to play. That may involve changing the phrases a bit.

Check out my class on improvisation if you would like to learn more and work with me on this.