This is a special lesson for beginners to musical improvisation. I'll show you how you can begin improvising right now as a creative and exciting part of your daily music practice.
I see the importance of knowing the sounds from the tonal map and being able to sing what you play. However, isn’t improvisation also a matter of transcribing other artists’ music to absorb the “feel” and “time” they have?
You may have heard that you need to understand a lot of music theory in order to improvise. But what if it's the other way around? That might sound confusing at first, but I believe that getting clear about this could potentially save you YEARS of frustration and wasted time.
Sometimes I have to listen to a chord progression between 5-10 times before I can recognize the chords. Is this normal? Or should I be able to do this instantly?
One of the most common frustrations that all beginning improvisers experience is getting lost in the middle of a tune. In this video I'll give you three concrete strategies that you can follow to make sure this never happens to you again.
In this video I demonstrate why tonal ear training is so much more powerful than listening for intervals, especially over long or complex chord progressions.
In this video I show you a complete system for studying new chords so that you can improvise over them with confidence, use them in your compositions and learn to recognize them by ear in the music of other people.
I'm currently practicing the IFR exercise Seven Worlds and I'm not sure how much time I should spend in each harmonic environment before advancing to the next. Is there any guideline?
In this video we are going to train our ear together, singing the tonal numbers over the famous 2-5-1 chord progression. This is the most important chord progression in jazz music and it also appears in pop, rock, blues and other styles. Sing along and explore these beautiful sounds creatively with me!
This listening activity will help you learn to recognize chord progressions by ear. We have put together a list of beautiful popular songs that use the exact same chords that you're studying in IFR Jam Tracks Levels 2 and 3.