When you read above that all the choices were up to you, did you feel a slight twinge of overwhelm, or that intimidation factor kicking in? I wouldn’t be surprised if so.
The Expansive Creativity approach was designed to help you overcome the #1 biggest challenge in Improvisation, which is feeling caught between either:
- Overly-constrained (with rules/patterns/vocab), robotic playing, or
- Terrifying, anything-goes overwhelm.
The one compelling advantage of the traditional improv methods is that for a complete beginner they keep you “safe” by limiting your choices to what’s likely to sound fitting, musically. Without that, it’s easy to feel instantly overwhelmed. If every note is possible, that’s an awful lot to try to choose from! And not just once, but again and again, moment by moment. For a pianist with 88 keys and ten fingers, surely some kind of rules or patterns are required—or some mysterious talent for knowing which notes to play?
Expansive Creativity is designed to connect you with your creative instinct and help you develop increasingly free, sophisticated and satisfying improvisations which are truly you, while keeping you feeling “safe”, helping you create satisfying music from day one, and still letting you become increasingly free over time.
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It’s named Expansive Creativity because it’s not an A-Z sequence of particular lessons. It’s an approach which allows an infinite journey of gradually expanding your creativity (and through that your overall musicality). |
It provides you with an ability to express your own creative ideas which you can then channel not only into Improvisation but also Songwriting and composing, Expression and Performance, and across all of your music-making, in any musical context. Like I mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, Improvisation is simply the most effective activity we’ve found for developing your creative instinct and the ability to express your creative musical ideas.
So how do we achieve that delicate balance between providing “guard rails” that prevent overwhelm, and still allowing you to feel freely creative?
There are three components to Expansive Creativity:
A. The Play-Listen/Listen-Play loop
B. Constraints and Dimensions
C. Playgrounds
These aren’t strictly sequential. Each component can be used alone, but they work best all together. We’ll go through each in turn, and show you how they inter-relate and combine.
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TIP: In everything that follows, we recommend recording your practice, and listening back. As noted in the “Agency and Authority” section above, the Expansive Creativity approach is very much about allowing you to become your own best teacher. Listening in-the-moment as you play is vital—but recording and listening back can provide a valuable additional opportunity to learn from what you created. On top of that, when you routinely record your improvisation practice, you can return to the recordings later—not just later in the same practice session, but days, weeks or months later—and have the chance to recognise and appreciate the progress you’ve made. It’s often hard to see any improvement when we’re in the thick of it, but comparing your improvised creations from a few weeks or months ago with what you’re able to do today can become a significant source of increased confidence and momentum. It also brings a major side benefit, something which Next Level coach Andy Portas describes as “mining for diamonds”. As you listen back to a recording of something you improvised, don’t just critique what you played. Be on the lookout for anything that makes you go “oh, that was interesting” or “I actually quite liked that bit!” It may look more like a lump of coal with a slight twinkle to it right now, but if you grab onto it and play around with it some more, you might discover there was a true diamond hiding inside. You can collect these “diamonds” as part of your own personal vocabulary and sense of your musical taste, as well as drawing further encouragement from them about your own creative potential. We’ll explore this idea more in Chapter 16: Songwriting. |