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Intro to improvising

If you’ve never improvised before it can be intimidating. But it doesn’t have to be. Think of it like a skill. The best improvisers are the people that have practiced improvising the most. They do it all the time. They work on making music up on the spot all of the time. And practicing it helps a whole lot. The more you practice soloing the better you get at thinking of ideas on the spot and the more comfortable you get expressing those ideas on the spot.

To get yourself started with improvising I’ve written down a few tips and exercises that I’ve used while practicing myself and while teaching my students how to improvise.

So let’s get started.

Play a bunch of random notes

I know this won’t be what most people think of as improvising, but it still is. It’s not soloing over changes or improvising using a motif, but it’s still improvising. Just play a bunch of random notes. It doesn’t need to sound good or be pretty, but just play something that you’ve never played before on the spot. Get used to literally just playing a bunch of stuff.

It might seem silly, but one of the barriers that I see holding people back from improvising freely and expressing themselves easily is that they’re too worried about playing a “wrong note.” So get those notes out of the way by purposefully playing a bunch of randomness. Just get used to playing something that you’re making up on the spot.

Think of this as shaking your arms out to loosen yourself up. Shake out a bunch of random notes.

Play something that sounds ugly

Purposefully play something that sounds ugly. I like to do this with my students sometimes because it always surprises them with how hard it truly is. The only requirement is that you try to play well. You want to intentionally play something that sounds gross and disgusting, but you want to play it with good technique.

This removes just hitting the piano as one of the possibilities that some players will immediately think to do. I do also make it a point to tell them that the goal isn’t just to smash their instrument, but to play a lick that sounds ugly, but is played well.

The goal is to play something intentionally. So if you’re playing with a specific timbre you want to be doing it purposefully and with the intention of creating an ugly sound.

Add ornaments to a melody

This is starting to get into improvising more properly, rather than some beginning exercises.

Take a melody that you know really well and add some ornaments to it. Imagine you’re adding runs and trills and extra expression and articulation to it. You want to make sure that some of what you’re adding is actual notes.

Make the melody your own by adding different runs either into or out of notes. Create your own version of that melody. Try to make it sound unique and like it’s your own.

Change the rhythm of a melody

Take a melody that you know well and change the rhythm. Play it while accenting different parts of the melody or add notes to create a different rhythm. The idea is to quite literally “play around” with the rhythm of the melody and create a slightly different version of that melody.

One way to do this is to play it and extend some notes and shorten others.

Another way to do this is to play it in different time signatures. This might be a little difficult for beginnings but it’s something that I did in my classes at Berklee College of Music quite a bit. One of my ensemble class teachers had us play different jazz standards in odd meters. We’d often take a song like “Girl from Ipanema” and play it in 5/4 or 7/8, where we have to change the melody to fit in a meter with an extra quarter note or a one fewer 8th notes.

Take a scale and play random notes from it

This one is similar to the first two, but take a scale like the pentatonic scale and play a bunch of random notes from that scale. It might not sound like the most beautiful music ever, but it’ll get you used to the idea of just playing something. I find this to be useful for people that are shy while improvising or scared of playing “wrong notes.”

This used to be me in high school. I was timid and shy while soloing because I didn’t want to play “wrong notes.” I’ve found the thing that helps me be less shy and less scared of “wrong notes” is by playing random notes. Just playing a bunch of random stuff helps me realize that there aren’t as many “wrong notes” as I think there are. It also helps me realize that it’s much harder to find a “wrong note” than it might seem.

Within some restrictions (the scale) you can play a lot of random stuff that doesn’t sound all that bad.

Another thing it helps with is getting your ideas into music. Making up different ideas within a scale will get your ears a little more tuned to what each note sounds like and how those notes can be put together to create different musical ideas. The more ideas you know within that scale the more points of reference you have for what each scale degree sounds like.

Make variations of a lick

This is another improvisation exercise. Take a lick that you like and make as many variations of it as you can. Change the rhythm just a little bit. Change the rhythm a lot. Change the accents. Change the mode or the scale. Add ornaments to it. Try to vary it as many times as you can to create as many different versions of that lick as possible.

This exercise is useful way beyond the beginner stage because it gets you thinking in variations and motifs, which are two things that improvisers commonly use to create well crafted solos that sound like they were pre-planned, when they weren’t.

You’re always a half-step away from a “right” note

The next two are going to be pieces of advice, but not necessarily exercises. A “right note” is always just a half-step away. If the note you’re playing doesn’t sound particularly pleasant shift that note up or down a half-step and it’ll likely sound a whole lot better.

For example if you’re playing an Eb over a D major 7 chord, shifting that note up to E or down to D will sound a whole lot more “in” than Eb will sound. An E is a 9th, which would create a Dmaj9 chord and D is the root of the Dmaj7 chord.

You’re never more than a half-step away from a “right note.”

If you play a wrong note, play it again

This sounds counter intuitive because you don’t want to be playing stuff that doesn’t sound good, but it can legitimize the note that you just played. If you end up hitting a sour note, hit it again. Accent it and then resolve it to a note that’s more in.

This will make it sound like you’re adding spice to your solo, rather than making a mistake.

It’s also something that modern jazz players will do on purpose. Some players, in order to get an “out” sound, will play a lick that’s in a scale a half step above the the scale built off of the root of the chord. For example, you could play a quick lick in Ab major pentatonic over a G7 chord to add some spice to it, then resolve that lick to a lick that’s in G major pentatonic or G mixolydian.

This will create a modern jazz sound with notes that are purposefully out of the chord, that then resolve into the chord. This technique is something that can be practiced on its own so that you can add that spice into your solos on purpose when you want to.

Purposefully accenting some notes that are sour and then resolving them is a quite advanced technique, and you can “fake it” if you accidentally hit a sour note.

Alright those are my tips for beginners learning to improvise or just starting with improvising. These tips are also useful for people that are more familiar with improvising if they’re trying to create more thought out solos. Many of these tips are applicable regardless of what level you’re at with your soloing.

Give them a try next time you’re practicing soloing or next time you want to start out with improvising. I hope they help.

ISJ

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Good playing habits

One of the most common bad habits that I see students making is playing with tension.

It’s hard to play relaxed at first because you’re thinking about so many things and trying to do so many different things at the same time. You’re also moving your body in ways that are new and unfamiliar. The positions that you need to get into to play an instrument aren’t often positions that you are in normally (think about playing trumpet or violin).

But even if it’s difficult you should try to play as relaxed as possible.

One way that you can do this is to scan your body as you’re playing for tension. This is a technique that I learned from one of my teachers at Berklee College of Music. He noticed that I had my foot up on it’s toes and that my calves were tensed while I was playing. So he pointed it out and told me to set my foot all the way down and to relax it and then play again.

It can be a hard to feel tension without thinking through each part of your body and checking whether you feel tension there.

Some common places that I’ve seen people having tension, to get you started, are in their forearms, hands, shoulders, and face. Those are some of the most common places to have tension.

As you check through areas of your body for tension try shaking those parts of your body out or stretching them to get yourself to relax more. If you’re able to relax those tense areas of your body you should notice how much easier it is to play. Playing relaxed feels much better and much more effortless than playing with tension.

ISJ

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Detailed playing

I’ve been learning a few different songs on guitar recently and one thing that I often hear that distinguishes an experienced player from an un-experienced player is detailed playing. Playing with a lot of detail means adding articulations and expression to almost every note.

For example the solo in DevilDriver’s cover of “If Drinkin’ Don’t Kill Me” has a lot of articulations in it that might be easy to miss. It’s definitely easier to play the solo without all of the articulations.

Many of the notes have slides either into them or out of them. Some of them are reverse slides. Some notes have bends and others have vibrato. Some notes are hammer-ons and some are pull-offs. Some notes are played staccato and some are played legato.

This isn’t specific to guitar music or guitar playing. This type of playing, detailed playing, is something that almost all experienced musicians do. It becomes a natural expansion of expressing yourself on your instrument. Just take a listen to any professional violin player and listen to and look at how many notes they’re adding vibrato to. Then pay attention to how that vibrato changes depending on the context of the music.

Here are some tips for how to improve the detail of your playing.

Practice slowly

This one will almost always be my first tip for how to improve anything about your playing. And I want to be clear about just how slowly I mean. Practice with each note lasting for two measures; two tied whole notes. Then practice as if every note is a whole note. Then practice with every note as a half note. And so on.

Practice so slowly that you can play each tiny detail correctly. At first this will take a lot of patience if you’ve never done this before. But as someone who uses this technique frequently, doing it repeatedly and often helps improve your playing so much that it’s worth it every time.

Sometimes it might be enough to play it through super slowly only once. Sometimes you might need to play it through slowly a few times, but you’ll get the biggest benefit out of playing it so slowly that everything is perfect.

Practice each articulation separately

If there’s one note that has a specific articulation, practice that note separately.

An example of this is “Fives” by Guthrie Govan. In the main riff, the third note has a very wide and fast vibrato, but the note isn’t that long so it can be difficult to add that much vibrato that quickly. Practicing that note separately can help a lot. Just practice playing that note as if it were a whole note with wide, fast, and even vibrato. Then try to shorten the note to the correct length. Then add it into the riff.

Isolate single notes that have difficult articulations and play them separately. It’ll make it easier to add each articulation if you’re only thinking about one note.

Practice transitions

Any difficult transitions should be practiced by themselves. Take the last two or three notes of the previous section and the first two or three notes of the upcoming section and just work on that transition. Think of the transition as being it’s own part of the music. When playing two sections you aren’t simply playing two sections in isolation, you’re also playing a transition between those sections.

We want the transitions between the sections to be played as smoothly and as accurately as the separate sections themselves. This means that we need to practice just the transitions.

Practice scales and arpeggios with articulations

Another way to get used to playing with lots of expressions is to practice scales and arpeggios this way. If you’re playing a G major scale, practice it all legato, all staccato, with different amounts of legato, with different widths of vibrato, and different speeds to vibrato. Play it with any other articulations that are specific to your instrument.

For example on guitar you could play it while adding a bend to each note or with tremolo picking. Play each note sliding up into it, down into it, up out of it, or down out of it.

On violin you can change how many notes you play with one bow or change the bowing pattern. Play scales with hooked bowing or using different parts of the bow.

This might take a lot of time if you’ve never done this before and depending on how many articulations you try to practice, so separate it between practice sessions. Practice one articulation one day and another articulation another day. You don’t need to practice everything all at once.

Final notes

Hopefully some of these tips are useful. Take whichever tips you think are useful and will help you with your playing and use them the next time you practice. Depending on what specifically is difficult for you some of these tips may be more helpful than others. Take those, use them, implement them in your practice routine, and remember the other ones for later situations that might come up.

I hope this post was useful.

ISJ

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Free easy orchestral arrangements

Here are some free easy orchestral arrangements that I’ve found recently. I’m always trying to look for more arrangements to use with my students and so far this is what I’ve found.

Music by Arrangement

Easy String Orchestra Music

These two cites have saved me from having to make my own arrangements all of the time.

ISJ

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Learning to play dynamics

If you’re new to playing an instrument, or even if you’re an intermediate player, playing dynamics can be a tricky thing to do. Having the control to play at different volumes, and being able to play at specific levels takes a lot of practice.

It also takes some knowledge too because different instruments require different techniques to play at different dynamic levels.

The way I have my students practice dynamics, and the way that we can all practice them is to exaggerate them as much as possible. When playing a piece of music that has piano and forte markings written in, play the forte as loud as possible and play piano as loud as possible.

The reason you want to do this is because when you’re first learning to play dynamics, you often are able to play two different dynamic levels and those often end up being mezzoforte and mezzopiano. Playing two dynamic levels is often something players can do fairly early on, but making sure that those two levels are far apart in volume takes practice. If we look at forte and piano as just loud and soft we only have two levels, but if we add in mezzoforte and mezzopiano they’re actually 3 dynamic levels apart. This means we really want to hear a big difference between those two.

It goes from being loud and soft to being really loud and really soft because loud and soft are in the middle.

I know this might seem a bit unnecessary to point out and I’m doing it in a simplistic way, but it’s worth noting that we want those dynamic levels to be quite far apart. It’s easy to play loud and soft. It’s much less easy to play really loud, loud, soft, and really soft. That’s why exaggerating them is useful.

Exaggerate them so that once you’re able to truly play fortissimo and pianissimo you’ll be able to dial it back a little bit to get to the correct dynamics.

When you do this you’ll likely notice that playing loud enough to play fortissimo and playing quiet enough to play pianissimo is quite difficult. Playing loud isn’t just about smacking your instrument as hard as you possibly can. That’ll get you a certain level of volume, but you’ll notice that professional musicians who are playing really loud aren’t just hitting their instrument harder than you are.

If it were the case that just hitting your instrument harder is what allowed you play louder then you wouldn’t want to practice with an instrument. You’d want to work out and get stronger so that you can play with more force. It’d also mean that the loudest players would be the ones that are the strongest and with the most muscle mass. And that’s not the case. Not every musician is jacked and not everyone that’s jacked can play loudly on an instrument.

We can also observe this by watching professional musicians play. If we watch professional piano players playing incredibly loudly, they aren’t hitting the instrument as hard as they can. They’re playing it in a specific way, but it’s not just hitting it as hard as possible or putting in as much effort as possible. They’re incredibly relaxed and playing with a lot of control over the tiny muscles in your hands and fingers.

That’s where the volume comes from. It comes from being relaxed and using the muscles in connection with each other, not just sheer brute force.

You can check this yourself by trying to smack your instrument or blow into it as hard as you can. That’ll get something that’s fairly loud, but to get past that (and not exhaust yourself from playing) you’ll have to improve your technique. Just hitting the instrument isn’t going to cut it. That’ll get you forte. To get to fortissimo or fortississimo (triple forte) you’re going to need better technique.

So as you practice playing loud and soft practice relaxing and playing as loosely as you can. You don’t want to tense up, which often happens if you’re thinking “hit the instrument with as much force as possible.” You want to be relaxed and in control, not tensed up.

This is why alternating dynamic levels can be so useful. In order to play quiet you have to relax and play loosely. The softer you get the more delicately and the more loosely you have to play. And once you get used to that feeling of playing quietly you’ll be able to play loudly.

I’m not an expert on playing woodwind or brass instruments, but I imagine the technique is somewhat similar. Learning to play quietly goes hand in hand with learning to play loudly. It takes a specific amount of control, technique, and relaxed playing, otherwise it won’t happen.

I’ve heard some piano players say that to improve your loud playing and your volume you should only practice quietly. Practicing playing quietly is more important than playing loudly. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but it’s definitely incredibly useful. They feel very similar to each other once you get used to playing them back to back.

Give it a try with your playing and I’m sure you’ll see what I mean.

ISJ

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Starting from the top down

I may have written a post about this before, but I think it’s worth going over again.

Planning your music from the top down, meaning from the larger form down, can help keep the piece of music organized and sounding well planned. It can keep it focused in a way.

Writing the music as you go is a great way to start out, but after having written music that way for a while it’s useful to start exploring different ways of composition.

Let’s go through a few steps we can take that will help us get used to doing this.

0. Gather your materials

I made a YouTube video about this a while ago that would be useful to check out, but the main idea is figure out what language you want to use in your piece. Musical brainstorming can be a good technique to use at the beginning of this process.

Come up with a few different musical ideas and create different variations of those ideas that you want to use in your piece. Choose your harmonies and your rhythms and try to come up with the raw materials that you’ll be putting together to create your music.

This step can be incredibly useful if you’ve never done this before because it forces you to focus on single ideas, outside of the context of a larger piece of music. It separates them and can help you decide what ideas you want to include in your piece of music.

1. Plan the larger form first

This means that you start by choosing what form you want the piece to be in. You can choose something that’s traditional like a rondo, sonata, theme and variations or rounded binary form or you can assign letters or numbers and write it out yourself. Either will work.

Decide what order the sections will be in and how they will be related. If you choose a form like a rondo or a sonata that’s basically already decided for you, but it’s still useful to choose what form the piece will take.

After deciding what the larger form is you can decide what materials you’ll be using in each section. This is one of the more fun parts of planning out music to me. You get to choose where to put all of your different ideas. Maybe you want to use two different themes in the first two sections and then introduce a third section with the retrograde of the first idea.

It can feel like you’re slotting into place different musical ideas and completing a type of musical puzzle.

2. Plan the lengths of sections (roughly)

The next thing to do after having decided the larger form of the piece is to plan out the lengths of the different sections. I have a video about keeping your sections proportional that might be useful here, but the main idea is to divide up your song into somewhat even sections.

You want to have enough time to fully develop and explore each idea that you introduce. If the sections are evenly spaced that will give you enough time to explore each idea equally. If one section is twice as long as another it can make that section sound lopsided where one idea is explored and developed quite a lot more than other ideas.

This doesn’t need to be final and definitely can change later if the music calls for it (which I’ve found often happens), but try to get a rough idea of how long each section will be and how long the total song length will be.

3. Plan any key, meter, or tempo changes

Next you’ll want to plan out any large changes that might happen in the piece of music. If you want to you can even plan out how the transitions will happen and how long those transitions will last.

This step can be helpful in preparing those transitions. If you know that in four measures the music needs to modulate, slowly, to a different key you can prepare for that and write it into the music from the beginning to avoid any headaches of trying to figure out how to fit that transition in later on.

4. Write your music

Now we’re at the main part. Writing the music. Flesh it out. After having completed the first four steps you’ll have a great idea of what the end piece will sound like, and this part is mostly about finishing and polishing your ideas. This is where the orchestration and the arranging happens. It’s also where you decide how exactly you’re going to play different ideas and how those ideas will flow into the other ideas.

This step will go a lot faster and a lot smoother after having gone through the above steps. Then you’ll have a well planned and prepared piece finishing.

Final thoughts

If you’ve never written music like this it can feel robotic and a little cold. I don’t recommend writing every single piece of music like this, mostly because boxing yourself into only using one method of writing probably won’t give you the best results all of the time. But it’s a useful way of writing to be able to do. And the skills that it teaches you and helps you improve will help improve your compositional skills all around.

The main skills this helps with is developing a sense of musical form. Writing in a way that feels and sounds organized to the listener is what writing like this will develop. It’s a skill that’s quite important in being able to write a wide range of music and being able to express yourself in different ways. Some days you may want to just start writing from the beginning and write it all the way through from the beginning. Some days that might not be the easiest way to write. Take this technique out and it can help you get some music written and planned.

Give it a try next time you write a piece of music and see what comes out. You might just be surprised at how well composed the music ends up being.

ISJ

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Re-use lesson plans

Today’s post is specifically about teaching because something that’s saved me a ton of time in planning the lessons that I teach is re-using lesson plans.

This sounds obvious, but sometimes when I’m planning what I’m going to teach I think that I need to reinvent everything. I get so caught up in creating a new curriculum for the year that I forget that I’ve done this before. I often choose to teach the same things or the same ideas and concepts. So I can just re-use my old lesson plans to teach those ideas, rather than having to create something completely new.

If something worked well the last time, then re-use it for the next time because it’ll likely work well again.

I also start with older lesson plans, adjust them to fit the new situation, and then create a slightly updated version of that lesson plan.

Not every new lesson you teach needs to be new materials.

The same can be said for programming music. Not every concert needs to be new. You want to avoid having your players play the same thing repeatedly, but re-use the same music if you’re already familiar with it. If you programmed something a few years ago and you know it really well, it can be useful to

ISJ

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Templates

Something that can save you a lot of time when writing music, planning to teach music, creating music on your computer, or arranging or composing music in a notation program is using templates.

I know this is something that’s a little basic, but it can save you a lot of setup time because you’ll have everything ready to go at the beginning. It might seem unnecessary, but when you need to do something quickly it can be incredibly useful.

For writing music by hand maybe that means keeping a sheet of music that’s already arranged for different ensembles that you either special order or that you photo copy. I personally don’t keep a template for writing music by hand, but most of the time I write by hand I only write a piano sketch and orchestrate it later. I do however use a number of notebooks for this purpose to keep everything together, and it’s always the same type of manuscript paper. A composer friend of mine orders music manuscript paper from Judy Green Music and he finds the paper they have incredibly useful.

For planning to teach music maybe that means keeping a document with the different sections of a lesson already labelled and setup. I keep an electronic version and printed versions of this because I plan much better and remember much better when I write stuff out by hand. It has places for me to write the grade level, time allotment, topic, unit, and different sections of the lesson. Those sections are Introduction, Direct Instruction, Guided Practice, Check for Understanding, Independent Practice, and Closing. I don’t always follow this exact format, but it’s easy for me to plan and fill out those sections when I’m planning. Having this simple template helps me save a little bit of time whenever I plan my lessons.

For making music on your computer that could mean keeping a template in your Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) that has a number of virtual instrument tracks and effects tracks already setup. I also have a template in Pro Tools for making mockups of orchestral music. I don’t use it super often, but having it makes it just a bit easier and quicker to create. I use Albion One for my template so that I can sketch things quickly. I know this topic is a whole long conversation among media composers, but I keep mine simple for the use of making quick sketches. My computer also likely won’t be able to handle having every sample library I own open all at once. So I keep a template with Albion One. It’s simple and just has three sections for woodwinds and brass; high, middle, and low. It has two sections for strings; high and low. For percussion I have a few common instruments that I often use like harp, glockenspiel, bass drum, snare drum, and cymbals. I route all of this to two different reverbs; a convolution reverb and an algorithmic reverb. This might sound complicated, but in terms of media composition templates this is quite bare bones.

Lastly for composing or arranging music on a notation program I have a few templates in Finale. The program comes with preset templates that are quite useful, but I have one for my different orchestra classes that I teach. It includes the different instruments that I have; flute, clarinet, saxophone, and strings. This way I can arranged songs quickly and copy and paste music between the different sections easily. Not all of my classes have all of those instruments, but it’s easier to delete a whole instrument than to add an instrument in.

If there’s something that you repeatedly do it can be useful to create a template to use to make it just a little bit faster and easier to complete.

I hope this information was useful in figuring out how you can make some templates of your own.

ISJ

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Implementing vibrato

Vibrato is something that can make a piece of music sound like a piece of music. Playing without any vibrato often sounds flat and maybe a little lifeless.

But we don’t want to just add as much vibrato as we can to every single note. Some notes might require just a tiny bit of vibrato. Some notes might require a slow vibrato. And some notes might require a fast vibrato. The same goes for wide or narrow vibrato.

A lot of this is up to the discretion of the player.

The way you can learn to do this is to practice it different ways.

Take a slow song. A ballad would be a good choice.

Add some slow vibrato to the ends of the notes. Don’t add it at the beginning, but start about halfway through the note’s duration. See how that sounds.

Then add the vibrato at the beginning, or just the end of the notes.

See how those sound.

Add fast vibrato to the notes and see how that changes the sound of the notes.

Do the same thing with the width of the vibrato. Experiment with both narrow and wide vibratos.

Listen to them closely and figure out which type of vibrato you like.

A common way to add vibrato is by adding slow and narrow vibrato to long notes at slower tempos and wider and faster vibrato to songs at fast tempos. That’s often how musicians play vibrato. That’s a good place to start too because it’ll give you a benchmark or a reference point of how to play vibrato.

As you practice adding vibrato and expression to different pieces of music you’ll likely have opinions about what types of vibrato you like and what types of sounds you like in different types of music. That’s good. That means you’re developing your own musical taste and style.

ISJ

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Over express yourself

This is an activity that I tell my students to do all the time.

I tell them to play like they’re the best musician they’ve ever heard. Imagine that they’re the absolute best musician ever, or at least they think they are, and play the music that way. Add way to much vibrato. Exaggerate the dynamics. Exaggerate all of the articulations. Play like you’re the best player ever playing the best song ever.

And I demonstrate this for them. I make faces. I move around. I add way too much expression to every part of the music.

It always gets a laugh, but they end up playing the music much better.

Less experienced players often forget to add in all of the dynamics, expression, and articulations that are written in the music. And understandably so because it’s a massive amount of information.

It’s a ton of information to think about. Thinking about adding vibrato on every note, while also thinking about where to put your fingers and how to use your bow or your embouchure or your pick, while also thinking about what the notes are and what the rhythms are, all the while thinking about how to play staccato versus legato and trying to play those at different volumes is a lot. That’s a lot of things to be doing at once.

And thinking about all of those different things causes us to only kind of play all of them. We don’t play as loudly as we could for the forte or fortissimo sections. We don’t play as staccato as we can for the staccato sections. We don’t add vibrato when we can during the sections that need it. And all of this happens because we’re trying to do too many things at once.

One way to improve this is to think “over express” yourself in the music. Play with as much feeling and emotion as possible. Play self indulgently is another way I phrase it sometimes.

This gets the students to understand exactly what I mean. They don’t need to hear separately, “Play staccato. Play legato. Add vibrato. Play piano. Play forte.”

Give it a try sometime. Whenever I practice like this I surprise myself with how well I can play. I’m surprised by how many different things I can play and how well I can express myself. I know all of those things separately, but sometimes I forget to add them together when I’m playing.

We are playing music after all. We want to hear some emotion and some expression.

So give this a try next time you practice. You might impress yourself with how much you can do.

ISJ

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