Improvisation on the piano is a useful skill for any pianist. It adds creativity and imagination to your playing, tests your musical and theoretical knowledge, allows you to adapt to any situation, and is an impressive skill to wow others with. For many pianists though, even piano improvisation basics aren’t intuitive skills, and require practice to develop.
Just as constant sight-reading will improve your reading ability, constant practice in improvising is important to improve your skill. We will take a look into the first steps for beginners in this process, as well as advice to keep in mind during your improvisation practice or performance.
The First Steps
1. Understand how music works: harmony, melody, and structure
Music consists of three elements necessary to understanding improvisation. The first two are harmony and melody (in no particular order) and the third is structure. If we consider each element separately, we will have a better understanding of the ingredients in this mix, and a greater chance of mastering piano improvisation basics.
Harmony is the building block for the melody and is imperative for knowing which notes to play. Harmony means knowing the scale and chord for any particular moment, and will allow you to consciously choose your notes. Notes that are in the harmony will sound good together, while notes that are outside the harmony will create dissonance but add interest to your tune. For beginners, place the harmony in your left hand, using simple triads and chord inversions first.
Melody is the tune that you create over harmony and is usually played by the right hand. It begins with a note in the harmony and basically travels between harmony notes to create motion and direction. Melody notes usually move faster than harmony, so start by playing 2-4 melody notes in the right hand for each chord in the left hand.
Structure is the organization of music to create an organic and understandable piece. Without it, music is hard to follow for both improviser and listener. This includes knowing phrase structure and general musical form, as well as knowing cadences and common chord progressions. The most important rule to remember is that a phrase in music is usually four measures long.
2. Practice your scales and arpeggios
As mentioned in step #1, harmony is the building block to music, and one of the essential piano improvisation basics you’ll need. Knowing your scales and arpeggios is therefore necessary for knowing the notes in a given harmony. Scales and arpeggios are also important technical skills for melodic improvisation as well as general repertoire, so they serve a triple function!
3. Choose a chord progression
Chord progressions are patterns of chords that commonly show up in music. This requires an understanding of harmonics function in chords, and these following points offer a basic guideline for creating a chord progression:
– The tonic (the first scale degree in a scale) is the home key. Pieces end and begin in tonic, which is signified by the Roman numeral ‘I’ in music theory.
– The dominant (the fifth scale degree in a scale) is the chord that leads back to tonic. To end a section or end the piece, use a dominant to tonic motion (V to I).
– Subdominant chords are chords that lead to the dominant and are used to create interesting harmonies before the end of a phrase. These include ii, IV, and vi (lower case Roman numerals signify minor chords, while upper case Roman numerals signify major chords).
– Most basic chord progression: I-IV-V-I
4. Improvise your left hand
Once you decide on a chord progression, practice it first by blocking these chords in the left hand. Let us take the chord progression I-IV-V-I in the key of C major as an example:
I = C major chord (C-E-G)
IV = F major chord (F-A-C, created by building a triad on the 4th scale degree using the notes of the scale)
V = G major chord (G-B-D)
Once you have repeated these chords a few times to memorize the notes and hear the progression, you can rearrange the notes within a chord to create smoother voice-leading (basically less awkward movement within the hand). For example: in the F major IV chord, keep the C on the bottom of the chord so that your bottom note stays the same as the C major I chord (C-E-G moving to C-F-A). This allows you to maintain a similar hand position on the keyboard between these two chords. Another example is rearranging the notes of the G major V chord, using B-D-G instead of G-B-D, which creates more efficient motion from the previous chord.
5. Add a simple melody
Now that you have your left hand bass line, know that you will be repeating this progression multiple times as you practice improvising the melody above it. Start by first playing one note in the right hand for each chord in the left hand. Choose notes from the chord, so using C, E, or G in the right hand when the left hand is playing a C major chord.
Next step is to increase the number of right hand notes per left hand chord and add rhythm to your melody. Aim for stepwise motion and occasional small leaps, as that will create a more tuneful melody.
6. Ornamentation of the melody
Music consists of repetition and ornamentation, whatever style you are using (classical, pop, jazz, blues, etc). Improvising is all about taking a basic pattern and building different or new patterns on top of it. Now that you have your basic pattern, it is time to decorate and create variations. Despite the seemingly self-inspired act of improvisation, there is actually a glossary of ornamentation techniques that professional musicians use. Imagine a piece as a Lego set and each Lego piece is a specified harmonic or melodic formula. You build the set by putting together these little formulas and following the structural guideline.
Here are some common melodic ornamentations to use and examples are provided in parenthesis:
- neighbor motion: going up or down one step before returning to the same note (C-D-C, G-F#-G)
- passing notes: adding the note between a third leap (adding D between C-E, adding B between C-A)
- filling in leaps: adding the notes between the two ends of a large leap (adding D-E-F between C-G)
- turns: similar to neighbor motion, but including both the upper and lower neighbor notes before returning to the original pitch, with the upper note occurring first (C-D-C-B-C, G-A-G-F#-G)
- repeating notes: simplicity is good
- octave higher or lower: change registers
Expanding Your Improvisation
Once you understand these basic beginner steps to improvisation, here are some suggestions to increase the style and level of your improvising:
- Play different styles of music – knowing and learning different styles of music adds variety to your imagination and variety to the kinds of accompaniment patterns or melodic styles you hear. When playing a sonata or variation next time, notice how the composer varies the original pattern and try these in your improvisation next time!
- Delve deeper into music theory – this will expand your understanding of chord progressions and help increase the variety of chords you use in your improvisations. Understanding music theory will also introduce different scales, cadential motions, and possible variations in the melody.
- Try more advanced rhythmic patterns and layering – in jazz improvisation, there are formulas for different rhythmic patterns in the left hand. In classical improvisation, there are schematas for chord progressions and many different styles of accompanimental patterns. With the same chord in the left hand, try placing notes on different rhythms to experiment with how it sounds! When you actually perform an improvisation though, remember that simplicity is also beauty.
- Listen to others – just as with any other repertoire, listen to others to find new patterns and get new ideas.
- Keep practicing! Playing music is the best way to develop piano improvisation basics, and a tried and true method for improving your skills.
Alison Chiang