Improvisation

by Sebastien

Hi david,

First off I'd like to say thank you for sharing your knowledge with us for free. I really appreciate all the hard work you put into this website.

I'm 21 and I've been playing the piano for about 2 years now. I feel like I'm ready to take my playing to the next level. I've been trying to improvise a bit lately but I always seem to end up with the same chords and same scale and same patterns.

I was wondering if you could give me some tips on how to improvise and perhaps give me some chord progressions I can practice with. They don't have to be easy since I like to play challenging music to expand my musical abilities.

In general I just want some more advice on how to improvise and learn some new improvisation techniques.


Thanks,

Sebastien

Faster way to find chords & apply improvisation naturally

by Juliana
(Jakarta, Indonesia)

Hi, first of all, thank you so much for this site.

I have 2 questions:

1. Is there a faster way to determine the chords of a song?
I never have any problem in finding the tunes/melody of a song, but I find it rather hard to choose the chords to harmonized it with the tunes.
A friend gives a tip to just try the chords that have that tune. It does work, though I only know the major & minor scale. Is there a faster way to find the chords?

2. How do you apply the piano improvisation naturally in a song?
I have this picture in my head on how I want the song to be played such as use hammer in this part, give a fill in that part, etc, etc... However, I just can't make my hands do what I pictured in my head.
What kind of practice do you suggest I should do to solve this problem?

Thank you so much in advance.