Thank you! More to come soon, hopefully.

I’m playing piano! Just picked it up in the last few years, but I’ve been playing guitar for many years (although I’m not that great at guitar either–I’d put myself at “serviceable metal rhythm guitarist” at best). Can’t use my usual cheap tricks from guitar (bends, hammer-ons and pull-offs, tapping, etc.) so I feel pretty naked on piano, but you’ve got to start somewhere!

Yeah, improvising is tough. There is a literally infinite space of possibilities, so the tendency is just to stick to what you know. I think the hardest part is that progress is so unclear. Like, if you gave me the most incredibly technically challenging piece you can think of–some blistering prog metal solo on guitar, or some devilish Liszt piece on piano–there’s no way I’ll be able to play it well at my current skill level, but if I sat down for an hour I could probably half-ass a single bar at a slow tempo and you’d be like, “Oh yeah, that kinda sounds right.” It might seem insignificant, but being able to confidently say “I can play 0.1% more of this piece than I could before I sat down!” helps so much with motivation.

With improvisation, you not only have to come up with interesting musical ideas, but you also have to translate them onto your instrument in real time. It’s a blend of creativity, musical vocabulary, musical ear, and technical ability that takes a long time to cultivate, and until you’ve cultivated it you’re gonna sound pretty unmusical for a while. I think kids have an easier time, since they judge themselves less and have less context for what they “should” sound like, but as adults we already know what we’d like to sound like and where we are now seems so far away. So I might sit down and practice for half an hour without an obvious indicator of how I’ve improved. Maybe I got a bit better at keeping my bass steady in the left hand while playing different rhythms in the right hand. Maybe I got a little better at navigating the scale(s). But even then, it’s not like I can make a good sounding solo, so it requires a lot of willpower to stay motivated.

As a small child, I remember improvising before I even knew what that was–just playing a bunch of notes, exploring different sounds, and having fun with it. I hope that as I slowly practice and gain more confidence, I’ll be able to express myself more freely and access those deeper emotions even as an adult, insecurities and all.

(tangential, but for some reason “sadboi chords” made me think of this scene from Spinal Tap)