1. Didja accidentally blow through the whole, "We're using our real names" thing on registration? No problem, just send me (Mike) a Conversation message and I'll get you sorted, by which I mean hammered-into-obedient-line because I'm SO about having a lot of individuality-destroying, oppressive shit all over my forum.
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Putting some chops together

Discussion in 'Critique & Feedback' started by Hur Ozan Cerrahoglu, Jan 27, 2019.



  1. Dear Mike, am I on the right path with this? It's nearly improvised but Is this the the correct way to spend time near piano looking for modulations and reharmonization and re-purposes ? P.s. : Please excuse my playing :(
     
  2. Oh man, I would lose my mind if I had to play with a piano with this much reverb on it for more than 5 minutes! It sounds like the piano is in another room with the door closed :D

    Not Mike, but this is very similar to what I do, especially when I'm "discovering" what is the overall vocabulary of a piece. I try not to worry about too much of what the "performance" of it sounds like (it's always bad) because I can hear through it, and I know what I meant; so on average my improvisations sound worse than this, because my brain is 100 times faster at having an idea, than my fingers are at translating it on the piano.
    After playing around with the idea and the mood for an indefinite amount of time, what I do next entirely depends on what I feel like doing, and it can be any one of the following:
    - I start to either record or write harmonic developments of the idea as "cells" that I might use in a modular way when writing the piece (which are informed by what I improvised beforehand).
    - I start writing the piece right away discarding the X minutes of improvisation I did (I don't use them directly although they helped me having a better perspective of what the piece is about).
    - I let the idea sleep in my Logic Pro session for a number of days, and when I go back I listen to the whole improv session, marking down what I think are cool ideas. The labels end up being quite descriptive (e.g. "theme A dissonant variation", "theme A - might be a finale", "Theme B counterpoint", etc.).

    I also noticed that if I improvise like you do (trying to get the piece flowing at any point in time) I end up using more boring ideas if I try to make it sound nice to other people from the get-go - so I really had to force myself to learn not to judge what my performance was. A good alternative to this kind of approach is to just slow everything down a lot, so that you give your brain time to think of harmonies you wouldn't immediately choose.

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    Here's an excerpt of a 30+ minutes improvisation I did on the theme of "Stille Nacht", a piece I wanted to reharmonize for Christmas (it feels like I'm posting a nude picture on the internet :D ):

    It sounds horrible, but I was really just testing "out there" harmonies. I was in this headspace where I was so focused on finding new harmonies that I actually made a lot of silly mistakes when playing this simple melody; I was so far into the development that I didn't really care about the melody notes too much.
    Some hours after the improvisation, without even listening to it, I sat down and I worked out a reharmonization in something like 30 minutes. Took me another 30 or so minutes to learn it properly and record it:
    .

    I hope this helps.

    P.S. when I was studying classical music, I asked one of my (composer) professors why he wouldn't write music during gap hours in the school. He replied: "composing is just like pooping, you don't really wanna be sitting there in a room where anyone can slam the door open and come in at any point in time".
    Don't be afraid to fail and produce more noise than music when looking for an idea!
     
  3. Many thanks!!!
     

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