Improvise!

Published: Fri, 01/28/22

I have discovered, in the course of writing this newsletter, that I do not tend to remember things in terms of calendar years, so I can't say, for example, whether I became obsessed with learning to play bluegrass dobro when I was 22 or 23. From this vantage point, it doesn't really matter, but as Bertie Wooster points out, it sounds a lot more suave and convincing to greet guests with a simple "Welcome to Chuffnel Hall" than with "Welcome to 3A Berkeley Mansions, Berkeley Square, London W1," and by the same token, it would be a lot more snappy and direct to be able to say "At twenty-two, I became obsessed with learning to play bluegrass dobro" than "I have a vague recollection that sometime around the point I turned twenty-two – or was it twenty-three? I can never remember these things. Jeeves? Do you remember when we become obsessed with learning to play bluegrass dobro?"

Whenever it was, a great deal of what I wanted to be able to do was improvised – playing solo breaks, playing fills, playing intros and outros – and bluegrass being bluegrass, a lot of it was going by fast. I had to figure out how to string together idea after idea without tripping over my own fingers or losing the flow. After crashing a weeklong workshop with dobro guru Stacy Phillips and witnessing him put Flatt and Scruggs sideman Josh Graves' entire career into a ten-minute nutshell, I went home to 82 Sterling Place #2, Brooklyn, NY 11217, wrote out a bunch of short examples and started practicing putting them together as many different ways as possible, armed only with a metronome and my incredibly simplistic recollections of doing combinations in a college math class.

What all of that amounted to was something I now think of as "modular improvisation." If you want to improvise, you can start by learning a number of small, three-to-five-note building blocks, then start creating solos by learning to assemble those building blocks in a musical way. As an improvisor, you don't have time to stop and deliberate, choosing notes one by one from this scale or that scale – by the time you've done that, the next chord has already arrived. By focusing on phrases – those little three-to-five-note building blocks – you can start stringing together short ideas that already sound good, and so get a feel for assembling ideas on the fly without having to come up with every one of those ideas on the spur of the moment.

Because of the coordination involved in playing fingerstyle blues – the fact that anything you do with your fingers has to be synchronized with what your thumb is doing – it turns out this phrase-by-phrase approach is ideal for learning to improvise on a steady bass blues. In this morning's live stream, I'll show you how to start improvising on "Trouble In Mind" using this specific, step-by-step process. Join me at 11:30 AM Central today at the link below:

Play Better Fingerstyle Blues, Part II – Improvise

You can download the tab here:

Download the complete PDF

More soon,

David