10th Jan

10th Jan – Today in our music performance we spoke about the concept of improvising and what it means. We decided to chose our song with 4 simple chords that would be a good basis for improvising over. The song chosen was 'Purple Rain' by the late great Price. We learnt the descending 4 chord pattern from ‘Purple Rain’. The chord progression is A sus2, Asus2/F#, E and D. We were only allowed to use 5 notes to improvise with. This decision was made as some members of the class had little improvisation experience. We felt limiting ourself to only 5 notes would be a good introduction to improving and trying to come up with different melodic phrases with a limited amount of notes. The 5 notes were in the key of A major, they were A, B, C#, D and E. (first 5 notes of the A Major scale.)
I experimented with the note choices and different phrasing to come up with different melodic ideas that fitted well over the chords. I found that sliding and bending into to the notes also gave my improvised ideas a different feel.
I set myself the goal of practising for the next week at home using the 5 notes to come up with different melodic phrases. I will do this by recording a loop of the chord progression and improvise over the chords.  One week will give me enough time to come up with some phrases to use in my next lesson.