FIDDLEPROV

Here’s what you’ll learn:

Week 1 - The Lay of the Land

You’ll get your bearings for this course and its huge, sprawling topic. We’ll dive into some playing and explore what comes up, so you have context for everything we dig into over the next six weeks.

Week 2 - Melody-Based vs. Chord-Based Solo Strategies

Most music improv teachers start with a deep dive into scales, modes, and chords. (Many never take it any further than that, actually.) I’ll explain why this is putting the cart before the horse, and get you started with melody-based strategies that give you a much more immediate payoff.

Week 3 - Building Genre Flexibility

Moving fluidly and fluently between genres and musician communities is the ultimate #musicgoal. During week 3 we’ll look at what distinguishes genres from one another, and how to tweak our solos to get the right sound for the situation.

Week 4 - Melodic Backup (aka Fills)

Fills are the little melodic lines we snake around the singer’s voice.  Melodic backup also includes things like pad (or drone) notes underneath the vocals. We do need to talk more about song structure, including chord progressions, at this point. That’ll give you the know-how to quickly find the simplest, most effective choices for these teeny tiny fill moments.

Week 5 - Chord-Based Improvisation

Now we’re finally ready to talk about connecting music theory to our soloing! Chord-based improvisation is what you’ll do when you don’t know the melody, or want to do something wild and crazy.  Whether you’re a theory newbie or an expert, I’ll make sure the theory aspect of this class meets you where you are so you’re not overwhelmed nor bored. The most important takeaway—which most improvisation resources don’t address at all—will be how to get music theory to serve your creativity, not vice versa.

Week 6 - Putting It All Together

We’ll talk about how to shape your solos so they sound coherent, even when you mix and match the various strategies you learned in class. (If you’ve previously worked with teachers/books that focused on fancy scales and “hot licks,” we’ll also talk about how you can incorporate that stuff.) You’ll get lots of playing practice going back and forth between fills and solos. In real life, of course, you won’t always be the only solo instrument in a jam or band, so we’ll also talk about collaboration and arrangement considerations. Finally, I’ll give you some thoughts about where you might go from here.