Improvisation by Ray Bell, Instructor of Guitar and Mandolin, Boyd Music Academy, You've Got a Friend Magazine, Spring, 1998 examples transcribed by Lena Cheatham

I wonder why most formal schools say little or nothing about the art of improvising? This seems strange, since during the time the old masters were writing, a person was not even considered a musician if he could not improvise! They didn’t just sit around and read notes all day; they wrote them, and in the cool of the evening they would get together with their friends and have a “get down and boogie” jam session. This is what the “Milton Cross” commentary had to say about Amadeus Mozart; “Given a theme, he could improvise for half an hour without repeating himself.” If you don’t improvise at all, you should give it some thought. If a person has a wonderful feel for music, great tone, terrific technique, and supposedly has it all, but does not improvise, the picture is incomplete. What is improvisation? It is spontaneous composition. This is not an easy concept, and it takes a good deal of time and effort to develop this art. One of our God-given flaws, is that we see a fraction and assume the whole. The art of improvisation is too large to see all the information at one time, so it must be covered a little bit at a time. Information alone will not help with this project - it must be practiced every day. If you have never tried this on a regular basis, then the more simple the start, the better. Some people learn to improvise without information. This is not advisable. Since you may not have tried to improvise before, one of the easiest changes to make in the melody, is to make no changes, but rather make changes in the rhythm. Take a very simple theme, like “Long, Long Ago” and see what might be done with it. Now for a slight change in rhythm. The next easiest thing would probably be to retain the changes in rhythm and change the melody by using an upper and lower neighbor, like this: The next examples jump a little further ahead. Yet another example: You will notice I didn’t put a period after the last title, as I thought you might like to add something to it. I would like for most of my articles to be interactive. Hopefully from these examples, you can see how these things could develop. This kind of thing depends very much on the rudiments of music, so all of the major and minor scales should be memorized, as well as all of the chords. Good luck!

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