i had a one to one about improvisation, its such a grey area about the best way to teach it to students, even to the extent as to whether it should be tailor made to the students abilities.

In jazz the 2-5-1 is the most common chord progression, and the common practice is to use aeberolds volume 3 backing track – where you practice in all 12 major scales the II-V-I chord progression.

I’ve been practicing it several months now, and on average it can take a new student up to 2yrs working with that one backing track, just to be able to play all the arpeggios in those 12 major scales without a sheet.

I use the backing track and quite often get lost, as to the name of the chord i’m playing in, but now i’m beginning to notice, if i’m mentally lost as to the name of the chord i’m working in, my fingers are starting to automatically go to the correct keys for that chord.

In theory that’s not improvising, but by being able to move around in the various chord keys builds a strong feeling in mentally recognising the different chord sounds and what notes are associated with them.

I’m in the process of creating a I-IV-V chord progress backing track, in all 12 major keys, similar to the II-V-I used in jazz, to see if that helps.

i’m not a premium member yet, as i’m spending 4 times the same amount in lessons which are technically progressing further on. In terms of lessons, there is no limit as to how far you want to set the bar.

Yeah i got confused, i assumed your mini-course page was asking me to signup to your premium website, seemed illogical at the time, to signup for something free when i was already signed into your site as a non-premium member. lol

Has anyone else managed to access the mini-course. i tried again today, and it just keeps asking me to sign in to the website and then goes to a screen with no reference to the course. I’m chasing my tail.

Another thing i noticed, i bought the major improvisation course years ago, and i went on it yesterday just to have a look, and a download link to one of alto pages comes up with a 404 ie page missing.

Lesson 2 alto web page, the download alto sheet button at the bottom of the page says the sheet is missing. Might want to fix that.

i started the major improvisation course in 2015 and gave up, when it started wanting me to memorise licks to use while improvising, that i found too difficult way back then. It’s good to have examples of improvising when starting out to get an idea of what is going on when someone else is improvising.