Re: Classically Trained, wanting to expand
Originally Posted by
JonZ
... classical musicians tend to be perfectionists, improvising at a beginner level can be very psychologically challenging for them.
As a former rock and 'round-the-campfire (more like 'round-the-6pack?) musician who's lately playing in a mandolin orchestra, I heartily agree. We're all amateurs, and about evenly split between the classically-trained and more casual rock & folk backgrounds. Few of our classical players who are comfortable in a bluegrass jam. BUT ...
One MAJOR difference seems to be that most of the "classical" people have rarely concerned themselves with chords, chord progressions, or most any form of musical structure. "Structure" is what the composer or arrange does to get the dots on paper, and we-all just follow the music as written. But more casual forms like rock, jazz, and folk just don't work that way, where most have to think in terms of chord progressions and single-key harmonics (which, BTW, can be totally separate from whatever key you're actually playing in).
If I were advising a "classically-trained" friend, I'd ask them to get familiar with to the "looser" forms of music by looking up such basic terms as: 12-bar blues, Nashville numbering, relative major & minor chords, classic rock progression I-IV-V, doo-wop progression I-vi-IV-V, 16-bar blues, jazz progression ii-V-I ... not that any of them are the MUSIC one might want to learn or improvise over, but they are all examples of the STRUCTURES that improvised music hangs on.
Maybe think of such topics as the "shoulders" and "hangers" that one should be passingly familiar with before attempting to design clothing!
- Ed
"Then one day we weren't as young as before
Our mistakes weren't quite so easy to undo
But by all those roads, my friend, we've travelled down
I'm a better man for just the knowin' of you."
- Ian Tyson
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