Improvisation I - "Stella By Starlight" Part 1
Practicing improvising on your own can be very tricky. I find it helpful to create simple, game-like scenarios based on a small set of rules. These games don’t necessarily make one improvise in the fullest sense of the term but they help develop my ability to think quickly about harmony and the guitar. The rules for this improvisation game are as follows:
Arpeggiate the chords of a song in 8th notes within a five-fret range of the guitar (in this case, from fret 5-9 inclusive).
Starting on the lowest available chord tone in that range (in this case, Bb, the fifth of a E half-diminished chord) and arpeggiate upward. Change directions only when the next chord tone falls outside of the five-fret range.
This exercise and others like it help me work out my knowledge of the fretboard in a rather rigorous way as well as force me to hear chords resolve one to another in ways I wouldn’t normally choose. Though the point of this exercise is to improvise using the rules only, it may be helpful to read through one chorus of the exercise, which you can find here. You can also watch me playing this exercise here.