I remember the first time I heard somebody jam out on the piano. I was in a piano store and the salesperson in his late teens or early twenties, was showing me some features on this electric piano I was looking at. He turned on the instrument and just started playing. It was great stuff. When I asked him what he was playing, he told me nonchalantly, that he had made it all up. I was amazed to say the least. On my drive home, I kept thinking to myself, "Damn! I've played the piano for 15 years and I can't do that, what's wrong with me?" Thus began my journey to learn how to improvise.
Having played the piano since the age of 5, I was raised strictly as a classical musician. I remember wanting to play the Ghostbusters theme song and after securing the sheet music for it, my teacher wouldn't even let me to play it. This is the background I came from, and I'm sure many of you know exactly what I'm talking about. Learning how to improvise was a journey I had to take alone. I had to teach it to myself. Here are some tips for beginners that I learned on my own that I wish someone would've shared with me when I first started making up melodies on the piano.
1. Play around with the white keys. The keys found in the scale of C Major are free of accidentals. You should play around with these notes with just the right hand and try to come up with melodies that are pleasing to the ear. The more you do this, the better your ears will get.
2. Experiment with simple chords. Use simple I, IV, V chords in either hand, changing between them in a recognizable pattern. The I chord is our basic C Major chord, our IV chord is our basic F Major chord and our V chord is our basic G Major chord. Learn these chords and play around with them by arranging them into patterns such as: I, IV, V, IV or I, V, IV, I, V etc. Come up with your own patterns and hold each chord for four beats before changing to the next.
3. Sing your notes. If you think about it, it's pretty easy to hum a melody that's improvised. This was the first thing I did when learning to improvise. You can't really sing a wrong note because you know (more or less) exactly how to make the pitch of each note your singing. With the piano, you have to know which key makes which sound in order to construct the melody in your head. A very helpful way to train your ears is to sing the notes while you play them. See how accurate you can get. It will take some time for most people, but once you're done, you should be able to sing through your fingers.
4. Learn a blues scale. Blues scales are SUPER fun when learning how to improvise. Look online for some basic sheet music that shows how to play a blues scale. Since we're playing in the key of C, find the blues scale in this key and tinker with it. You'll realize right away how much fun improvising with this scale is.
The most important tip of all is to have fun and to have faith. Everything gets better with practice and consistency. Sometimes it'll feel like you're not getting better but trust me, every time you sit down at the piano to do this you are getting a little better each time. Have fun!
The author is a professional keyboardist, producer and composer from Los Angeles. He has written an ebook on how to improvise on piano which teaches the basics of improvising in a few short hours. He also runs a music school which offers Orange County piano lessons.
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