Get Good At Improv With These Two Mindsets: Prep & Flow
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- Опубліковано 29 січ 2023
- Learning how to improvise can be challenging, confusing, and sometimes downright overwhelming. There are two essential mindsets everyone needs in order to truly unlock their potential as improvisers, the Preparation (or Practice) Mindset and the Flow Mindset. In this video, I break them both down and help you with tips and strategies that will get you on the path of continuous improvement in jazz improvisation! I also share with you some things I think about when I improvise in a true flow state, and offer you a key strategy to help you achieve flow state in your practice sessions. Wishing you love and music - Tito
My latest album URBANESSENCE is out on all streaming platforms!Head over to my Bandcamp page to listen to the tracks, and purchase a digital download or a physical CD unit, or do all three! titocarrillo.bandcamp.com
Tito Carrillo is professor of jazz trumpet at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: music.illinois.edu/faculty/ti...
These videos are such a fantastic resource; it’s great having them as a refresher of all the lessons you taught me years ago.
Great video Tito. You have that rare ability to articulate and convey some of the most difficult and challenging concepts in jazz improvisation. I find your videos to be some of the most useful tools in learning to improve my jazz education.
So helpful!
I have watched a few of your videos - they are all good, but this was perfect for me! Thanks! I am now subscribed and am looking forward to more.
FANTASTIC video and suggestions!
Everyone and anyone who is trying to learn to play jazz must watch this video!
Youre damn good GREAT TIPS.
Hi from Brazil. Great content!
Loved this video
This is a lot of awesome info. It is very interesting what you share and also very very useful without being neither basic nor patronizing.
Your channel is great actually. One of my favorites for jazz. Thank you for teaching us all; the teaching is so grounded and real. Just what one would be looking for in this kind of channel thank you❤
Really helpful. Thanks👍
I really look forward to your videos every week Tito. I haven't heard any other UA-camrs discussing these aspects of improvisation and performance. You really are a breath of fresh air (very handy for wind instruments!)
Thank you again from Paris, TITO
Ditto from Paris :)
Rewatch the last 5 minutes 😊
My struggle is that it seems like I’m never able to get fully “away from the written page” unless I shut down the theory in my mind completely. Otherwise I’m always thinking about the changes/form but on stuff I know by heart I can shut that part of my brain off and I get glimpses of playing completely by ear and it’s magical. It feels like I’m authentically communicating rather than just playing the right pattern for the right chord and I get completely into flow. I guess there’s a part of my that wonders how you actually bridge the gap between the technical/theoretical and the purely aural because when I tap into that I’m not thinking about the changes at all. I just hear the changes and melody in my head and respond to it. It seems to me like practicing that skill by working on audiation would be the most direct route to fluent improvisation but everyone both in my personal life and online constantly push the theory and analysis method as the primary way to advance in improvisation but I feel like I’m not able to simultaneously flow and think about the changes. They seem like mutually exclusive processes to me.
Red Rodney was a trumpet player in Charlie Parker’s quintet in the 1950s. He visited my college and gave a clinic where he shared that Bird wasn’t really thinking changes when he was playing. Red would sometimes stop him in the middle of his solos and ask him “what were you playing right there ?” and he’d respond time after time “I don’t know, C7?” But the reality was Bird’s solos meticulously define the underlying harmonies, and often superimposing new harmonies on top of the existing ones. So my question to you is this: when you stop thinking theory and chords, are you still able to outline the harmonies clearly, or do your solos run off the rails? If you start losing the harmony when you’re trying to hear your way through it, that means your ears haven’t developed the capacity to hear fully inside those harmonies yet. And to me, this is where repetition becomes crucial. You essentially need to feed your ears what you want them to be able to hear, and keep repeating it until you can hear it and sing it. This was the key that unlocked everything for me. Thanks so much for your great comment, I hope this helps.
@@jazzmindwithtitocarrillo605 I think this highlights exactly what my gut was telling me which is that the theory and technique are indeed useful things and are great tools for both nurturing your physical aptitude on the instrument and your ears but once you have a tune in your ears then you have to make the leap away from those tools and towards your internal voice and it's not as if those tools all of a sudden become irrelevant. Instead, they are always there as an aid to further develop your core musicianship but being over reliant on them can be a crutch that can actually prevent you from moving from the conscious to subconscious state when playing and I think most of the greats were primarily playing from an unconscious place. Every time I play my best it always feels like it's just a pure flow of ideas that I can hear in my head and the less I try to control the flow the better it sounds so long as I actually really know the tune.
@@jazzmindwithtitocarrillo605 Thank you for the detailed an prompt response Tito. I think you have on of the best music education channels I've seen on UA-cam.
@@jazzmindwithtitocarrillo605 One last thing Tito. I fully understand how this process of using prep to prime your ears for flow works in terms of a single melodic line but if I'm playing an instrument where more polyphonic activity/harmony is happening then it seems like this approach doesn't neatly extend into that arena because ultimately I'm only able to sing one note at a time so my feedback mechanism for training my ability to flow breaks down once I have to control more than one voice at a time. How would you recommend training the ability to flow while controlling multiple voices?
Yeah that’s a tough one, since I am not a great piano player. If I were, I think I would still try to be guided by the melodic line, even if I were harmonizing the line. It would just add this other harmonic layer to the process. Also, one thing I do experiment with in my own trumpet playing is superimposition, substituting other chords on top of the original ones. And I can tell you that the process is the same for me, where I’ll repeat an idea (ex. using Maj7#5 shape over a Maj7 chord) so much that I can both sing and hear the superimposed sound over the original chord(s).