You’re only seeing things they’ve practiced before

This is something my high school guitar teacher told me when I was first learning how to improvise. I was always so impressed by people who could easily improvise and come up with melodies on the spot.

That was a number of years ago, and now I really understand what he meant.

When you’re watching someone improvise, and they’re playing really well, you’re just seeing all the things they’ve practiced.

They might be putting those things together in new ways, but each separate piece is something they’ve practiced before.

Each articulation and chord voicing and lick is something that they’ve practiced before. Maybe they’re putting two licks together that they haven’t put together before, but they’ve practiced those licks separately before.

This mentality helped me in high school because it made me realize how much preparation and practicing and getting used to improvising helps. Improvising solos is how you practice improvising solos. If you improvise a lot, eventually you’ll get better at it and it’ll be easier to do.

It’s also how I improvise.

I don’t make up completely new ideas right on the spot. I’m almost always playing some combination of things that I’ve practice before. And even if it is a fairly new idea, the finger patterns, rhythms, or some other part of what I’m playing isn’t new.

As tired as the analogy of language and music is, it’s very similar to speaking.

Every time you speak you’re putting together words into a sentence to say something that you may or may not have said before. Some sentences you’ve definitely said before, but sometimes you might be putting together a long sentence that you’ve never said before. Or at least you’ve never said that specific order of words before. But you’ve likely said some combination of those words. Maybe pairs of words you’ve put together before. Maybe you’ve put together groups of three of those words, but not that exact combination of words.

Improvising is similar to that.

And eventually after doing it for a long time you have such a large vocabulary of words and phrases and sentences that you’ve both heard and played that you don’t have to think much about how to say what you want to say.

Or you don’t have to think much about how to play what you want to play.

ISJ