Let’s talk about improvisation. Better yet, let’s question what it is. How much of your extemporaneous playing is truly improvised, and not simply memorized? This is a central theme in our brand new interview with fearless improviser and insightful teacher Roy Ziv.
Training Your Spontaneity
Roy is an awesome player with an ear for writing killer melodic lines, both composed and improvised. As it happens, the two are not so different in Roy’s playing.
In the conversation, we discuss the middle ground between composed phrases and completely novel ones. In this liminal space, semi-memorized fingering and picking patterns are still mutable across different fretboard positions, strings, and different modes and keys. This is where Roy thrives.
Roy’s approach to learning is super hands-on and practical, leveraging in-the-moment exploration to generate new ideas which he can then slow down and attempt to perfect. In this YouTube excerpt, Roy outlines the process:
Roy’s workshop-style approach is a type of “pseudo-composition” that trains his ear to write new lines on the spot, while also training his fingers and pick to master unfamiliar mechanics. It’s a refreshing departure from the slog of memorization and etudes that we usually associate with learning to improvise.
Magnets And Mechanics
When the Magnet isn’t busy sabotaging Roy’s upper-fretboard exploits, it gets a really cool look at his super interesting mechanics. His effortless technique turns out to be a blend of double and single escape motions, even in places where you wouldn’t expect such blends, like pentatonic two-note-per-string phrasing. Strategic use of legato, sweeping, and hybrid picking rounds out the picture.
On the one hand, these elements serve specific technical purposes that experienced Cracking the Code viewers will probably already be familiar with, like empowering lines that need specific escapes. Again, pentatonic phrases are a great example of this since they can often function as a type of litmus test for escape motion based on the picktrokes players choose to start on. We discuss this specifically in the conversation.
But these techniques also do double-duty for musical and articulation purposes. For example, we look at how Roy prefers legato for a smoother start to scalar runs. At the same time, the Magnet reveals that this also allows Roy to conform lines to DSX motion, without needing to think about the escape directly. This is a prime example of how self-taught players can perfect complicated mechanics through intuition even if the initial inspiration was not strictly mechanical or even deliberate.
Overall this was a really fun conversation that’s both technically interesting and inspiring at the same time. Watching Roy go for it in a live interview setting, Magnets and fretboard access be damned, it’s hard not to reach for your guitar to give it a shot yourself.
Awesome! Where Can I Watch?
The package includes all three of Roy’s fearless backing track improvisations, as well as the unaccompanied tracks themselves for your own woodshedding.
Check it out now on the platform, or pick up a copy in the store!
Super fun conversation with an awesome player. Sorry for the delay on this – this was a few years ago at this point, but we’re motoring on our backlog. If you’ve followed Roy in the mean time, you can see he’s leveled up on his writing and improvising, even beyond the obviously high level in the interview. A quick scan through just a few things on his Instagram is just a buffet of awesome ideas and slick playing.
A good portion of this conversation is about improvisation and how Roy workshops it. It’s not super academic in terms of memorizing harmonies and scale shapes. It’s more about continually trying to create lines on the fly, then stopping to etude the novel ideas when they emerge. It’s almost the reverse of the etude-first approach most of us use.
Obviously he must have done some of the more memorization-heavy stuff at one point, and there is no shortage of ideas for learning these kinds of things. Or maybe he doesn’t – maybe it’s just folded into the process we outline in the talk, on an as-needed basis. But the less-talked-about part of this is how you actually learn to find those notes on the fretboard and connect them together on the fly during real-world playing. And that’s what we spend most of our time on in the conversation. A lot of great stuff in there.