The New Way to Learn to Improvise… It Just Works!

If you’re just starting to learn to improvise or if you’re not happy with your improvised solos, and you think what you play kind of sucks, I’m going to tell you the main reasons why, what you’re probably doing wrong, and exactly what to do to solve the problem starting today. From now on, whenever you practice you will be actively improving with confidence knowing you’re on the right path.

But first, I want you to have a listen to me demonstrating what I’m about to show you in the video above.

What Usually Goes Wrong in Improvisation

The things that most saxophone players do wrong when it comes to improvising are actually really common. I know this because I hear the same problems in countless players.

If we take sound out of the equation, on the most basic level we’re left with rhythm and note choices, right? Beginning improvisors usually have a pretty poor sense of rhythm and very little idea of which notes to play. The good news is we can change what and how we practice to address both of these things.

In a short amount of time, we can develop a much stronger sense of rhythm, and the confidence to choose the right notes. The example that I played at the beginning of this video is actually very simple, but the reason it sounds so good is because of the strong rhythmic ideas and solid note choices.

New BetterSax course- Chord Tone Zone

That was actually an etude from Adam Larson’s latest BetterSax course the Chord Tone Zone, based on the chord progression to the Jazz standard, “There Will Never Be Another You”. I want to give you a head start when it comes to learning to improvise, and this doesn’t just work for jazz, it can be applied to every musical style very effectively.

You see, once you know which notes to play, you can then just focus on playing rhythmically, and that is what makes solos sound great. Traditionally improvisation is taught by telling students which scales can be played over the given chords.

The Problem with the Traditional Approach using Scales

There are two problems with this approach though. Number one is that a scale typically consists of seven notes and that’s just too much information to start with per chord. The second problem is that not all seven of those notes will be good choices.

Some of them will actually sound terrible and if you have tried applying scales to chords, you probably already know that.

So the first thing we’re going to change is instead of thinking which scales go over the chords, we’re going to learn only the four chord tones; root, third, fifth, and seventh. We’ll save the scales for later. In the video above, I play a very basic example of practicing this over the chord changes to “There Will Never Be Another You”.

Using Chord Tones Instead of Scales

Now, just making that switch to chord tones rather than scales ensures that you are always making good note choices from the very beginning. It means that you are training yourself to outline the harmony and hear chord changes clearly, and it means you will eventually eliminate those poor note choices from everything you play.

That’s huge, but now we are simultaneously going to fix our weak rhythm problem. Instead of just playing static rhythms like I did in the first example, we’re going to practice applying much more interesting rhythms to our chord tones.

Strong Rhythms and Note Choices

The next example comes straight out of Adam Larson’s Chord Tone Zone course. This is just one of 90 different video
examples in the course where we apply this practice technique of strong rhythms with strong note choices over common chord progressions.

It’s a training method that will without fail get fantastic results for anyone learning to improvise, even if you’re a total beginner and have never improvised before. It’s so simple yet almost nobody does this. Instead, people typically spend countless hours practicing other things that are nowhere near as efficient.

In addition to all those chord tone rhythm exercises I mentioned, the course comes with etudes applying this concept in context so you can draw a direct line from practicing the material to using it in improvised solos that sound great. Listen to one of those etudes in the video and think of this as the sort of results you can expect to get from working through the course.

Getting a Head Start on Improvisation Skills

Remember, the main problems we need to solve starting out are weak rhythms and poor note choices. If you follow the method in the Chord Tone Zone course and practice this stuff consistently, I guarantee you that you’ll have a huge head start when it comes to developing improvisation skills, and the ability to sound great and play with confidence.

I can tell you that because knowing what I know now, if I had practiced this method when starting out, I would have slashed many years off of my improvisation development journey. I can’t go back in time, but I can help speed things up for you so you can have more fun and sound better every time you play from now on.

I can’t recommend the Chord Tone Zone enough. I absolutely love this approach and it goes really well with Adam Larson’s Rhythmic Pyramid course. You can get both of these at bettersax.com. The Rhythmic Pyramid is really taking this concept of thinking rhythmically while focusing on chord tones to the next level, and I show you what that is all about in this video which you may want to watch next.