Using “wrong” notes to your advantage
By Miika Korte
Improvising without sounding boring and uninspired sooner or later can be quite a challenge. That is why I want to show you a way how you can practice improvising, to come up with more creative ideas AND increase your listening skills.
The idea is based on an observation I had with many students already. Whenever they improvise and play a note that does not sound too pleasant at the wrong time, they immediately try to correct that note and jump to the next pitch when it is too late to “land in the right spot” at the right time anyway.
A much more musical approach would be to use that suspension/tension you just created and stop and listen to how exactly this sounds and come up with ways how you can resolve it in other creative ways.
Every note has a function in every chord in every context and they all have the potential to convey a different mood.
So, whenever you improvise, and you are hitting a “wrong” note, stop there and see how long you can play it until it either sounds “wanted” or until you figured out, what to do with this note next but on a conscious level, that does not involve any guesswork. After some time, this process will speed up automatically in your brain and you can do this on the spot without thinking.
The next step is, to stop the backing track completely and get 100 percent clear on what note, in WHICH register (there are also differences in whether a note is played an octave higher or lower), over which chord in which key and if you can remember, on which beat you hit that note. So, it is a good idea to record yourself improvising and listening back to what you played and analyse the recording instead of your live playing. This also makes it much easier for you to ask yourself the questions I listed before, because you are not busy thinking about what you are currently playing.
There is a bunch of ways you can use this procedure to enhance the variety in your playing.
Before reading on and see what my suggestions are, try to come up with your own ways of resolving a “wrong” note. Put yourself into an imaginary situation, in which you play over a backing track and you hit an awfully sounding note. Where could you go from there? What could you do? Or even start improvising something over one or two chords (make sure, the changes between chords do not come too quickly), and purposefully hit random notes on the fretboard and consciously decide what you want to do with that note next, but do not do it, before you have a clear idea in your head, FIRST! You can control yourself by forcing yourself to say out loud what you want to do. Now do not read on and come up with a few ideas.
How many ideas did you come up with? Here are some statements that include ideas, that you can use in your playing. The more precise they are, the better.
For example:
“I will bend this note up to the next pitch”
“I will slide up/down X steps higher/lower to the next pitch, that is in the chord”
“I will slide up way higher and then down to good sounding pitch X again” – Requires you to know what note you played and what notes the current chord consists of.
“I will play a sequence of X chromatic notes”
You get the idea. There are endless more possibilities you can exploit on your own.
Have fun with this idea!
About the author:
Michael Korte is a dedicated guitar teacher based in Finland. He teaches kitaratunnit in Tampere and focuses on helping his students becoming independent and reliable musicians.