What kind of music do you improvise to and how?

Dayvenkirq wrote: Question to fellow improvisers: what player/group of players would you like to sound like? And what kind of sound do you prefer (or what brand of instrument, if we are talking acoustic instruments)?

I do a lot of my own thing, exploring scales and stuff as we already discussed. I've always had this idea of going for some sort of blend between Frank Zappa and Steve Hackett's very different guitar styles, and wondering what such a thing might sound like. Ultimately I sound like myself, probably because I don't spend a lot of time with other people's material. It normally doesn't take me long to forget the two-thirds of someone's piece that I may have taught myself on some odd occasion, remembering only some peculiar highlight in the phrasing that I try to incorporate elsewhere.

Dear diary, 

Edited by Dayvenkirq - January 22 2015 at 00:48

^ Yeah, it's really hard to improvise lead without any rhythm back-up. In that case I'll just keep playing the root note on one of the three low (bass) strings of the six-string in my hands ... or just play something on my phone and try to come up with something to that track.

So, I went to the Guitar Center, with a single aim of figuring out the chords to Tully's "Sea of Joy, pt. 1". Instead of playing something jazzy, I wound up playing something rocksy. I don't why, or what has changed. I wanted to play something jazzy.

Edited by Dayvenkirq - January 02 2015 at 20:00

Wow.  It looks like I'm the odd-man-out, I improvise to other people's music all the time but I do so vocally.  I make up new backing-vocal tracks.  I do play guitar and keyboard, but while I've learned to play others' songs on them I don't think I've ever even tried to improvise (as in solo parts?) to other people's music.  I'm usually too busy trying to fudge the guitar playing so that I can actually manage it with my short stubby hands. :)

The chords vs. scales discussion is interesting - historically the western scale (well, as far as we know) came first (thanks, Pythagoras), but I don't usually think of either of them as the result of the other.  Each pitch is its own pitch and reacts a certain way with other pitches in my brain.  You all seem much more fluent in various types of scales than I am, though, which probably means you guys put together connections that I don't make.  Fun to read, though.

Most typically I improvise to nothing at all. When I do improvise to something, it will normally be a short passage that I've recorded on a looper. I've done some experimenting lately with playing along with Peyote music, but I need a lot more practice getting the right feel with that.

Edited by HackettFan - December 03 2014 at 00:40

I love my clusters. I usually write them for two or three guitars so I can make them nice and dense.

^ I have some phrases that I repeat sometimes but I never think about it, it's probably not that random, I know what I'm doing, but I don't "theorize" much.

For my recordings, I improvise over the backing tracks and choose the better phrases I come up with.

There was some scales that I played but it sounded so bad, I didn't know "how to work with it" as you say.

Seems like you won a dollar

^ I scat-sing for notes. I can't do a decent improv. for crap, so I listen to what the "backing band" is doing harmonically, figure out the chords, and just sing/vocalize random notes based on every chord, but in a way that the phrases melodically and harmonically "make sense" to me. I find it more rewarding when a solo is at least functional within the given musical context.

Edited by Dayvenkirq - October 31 2014 at 18:37

^ I can recommend a few things:

Edited by Dayvenkirq - October 31 2014 at 14:39