Syllabus
Unlock your natural creativity using a special Expansive Creativity™ approach which leads to true improvisational freedom.
In seven days you’ll be able to express your own musical ideas in a wide variety of creative ways, and handle many different improvisation scenarios with confidence.
MODULE 1
Our own mental attitudes are the biggest block to our creativity.
In this module, you will:
- learn about the improviser’s mindset – a fearless, attentive, creative, and reflective attitude that will allow you to spontaneously express yourself through your instrument.
- practice your Improviser’s Mindset with a fun quiz, and
- apply what you’ve discovered about “Improvising to Learn” with a hands-on improv exercise.
MODULE 2
In most improvisation training, the focus is on playing. But in order to achieve Expansive Creativity™, we must put much more attention on listening.
In this module, you will:
- explore the Improv Cycle and learn about how it ties into the Listen-Play and Play-Listen approaches,
- practice exploring both of these approaches through improvisation exercises that mirror our language-learning approach in a very expansive way, and
- apply the Improv Cycle to a surprisingly small number of notes.
MODULE 3
One of our most common fears in improvising is playing the “wrong” note. But what if you fixed it so you couldn’t play a wrong note? Expansive Creativity™ shows us that there are many other aspects of music that bring our improvs to life.
In this module, you will:
- learn about musical dimensions, and how constraints can allow you to focus on different dimensions in the music,
- practice focusing your attention on the dimension of rhythm, and
- apply what we’ve learned about rhythm by exploring its creative possibilities in the context of Afro-Cuban music and the Blues.
MODULE 4
Paradoxically, when it comes to improvisation, constraints stimulate greater and greater freedom!
In this module, you will
- learn to go deeper into the idea of improvisation constraints,
- practice exploring the world of possibilities that a three-note improv can provide us with, toy with time constraints, and finally,
- apply the lessons we learned from three-note improvisation to playing with backing tracks.
MODULE 5
Patterns can lead to lifeless, robotic, improv. But if handled with the Expansive Creativity™ mindset, patterns can become powerful “equipment” in our creative playground.
In this module, you will:
- learn how to avoid falling into the trap of playing the same improv patterns over and over, how to leverage patterns in creative ways,
- practice expanding your three-note improvisation to the five notes of the pentatonic scale, using some simple stepwise combinations to explore this new note palette, and
- apply this pentatonic playground to jamming with the Latin and Blues backing tracks!
MODULE 6
Truly satisfying musical experiences arise from creative use of musical structures.
In this module, you will:
- learn about what phrasing is, how it shapes your melodic improvisation, and how it fits into the overall scheme of musical structure,
- practice building your phrasing toolbox by running a single series of notes through specific dimensions, and
- apply your phrasing tools to a slightly larger musical structure as you string phrases together.
MODULE 7
In the last module, we introduced the concept of phrases – small but satisfying units of musical structure. Now we will grow this structure organically through giving our phrases more musical shape and meaning, and learning how to expand them into larger structures.
In this module, you will:
- learn about musical conversation how you can use “call and response” to give shape and meaning to your improvised melodic phrases, and how to use “target tones” to give your phrases somewhere to go,
- practice building your phrasing toolbox by running a single series of notes through specific dimensions, and
- apply your phrasing tools to a slightly larger musical structure as you string phrases together.