how do you practice improvising?

[brake]

like the title says, how does a person practice improvising? do you?

[janekbass]

improvising comes from piecing together fragments of a language of communication through music in your own unique way.

One of the main things you will need to do to practice improvising is to amass a vocabulary of sounds that have come before you. Standard language in the field of improvising that you can then build upon with your own ideas to create a new voice. I do this through transcription. Lots and lots of it. transcribing every musical thing that inspires me. Writing it down in what has become known to me as the scrolls (just books of manuscript paper full of my stuff). And then working on it day after day and making these fragments into something that's mine, and a tool for me to express myself through improvisation.

So to answer your question, yes I do practice improvisation through transcription, writing, and performing.

Easy,

Janek

[bongomania]

Yeah, +1. We absorb all kinds of input, and we practice all kinds of licks, and when the time comes to improvise we regurgitate what we've learned in some new combinations. Really good improvisers have a talent for drawing on a very wide range of sources intuitively. Others have to work at consciously maintaining a vocab list of licks for certain types of solos.

Edit: whoops, I posted this reply without realizing it was in the "ask Janek" forum. My apologies, although I suppose no harm in it.