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Do you hear everything in your head before you play it? or as you play it?

by that I mean left and right hands?

Just curious... I'm no jazz player... But I can imagine learning a left hand pattern, and then improvising the right hand.

I'm wondering how proficient improvisers do it. Do they hear everything including different voicings etc?

Great question. I have wondered these things for years. I've asked jazz pianists these questions. Never got a straight answer.

Thanks. I think it would be good to have an answer... because it gives a goal in mind to reach... And it gives an idea of what is possible and what isn't. Right now, I'm just not sure what's possible.

If hearing the whole thing in your head is a common method of improvisation... then it's worth the effort to work towards... however, if it isn't, or if that's a rare gift, then it would be good to know.

Right now, I can't imagine hearing both a lead line and bass line simultaneously in my head... not really... I can imagine going back and forth between the two in my head... but I can't imagine them together, which is what I'd think a jazz pianist would have to do...

Yes and no... what do you mean by "hear"?

When I practice in a conscious state of mind I am thinking ahead in the sense that I am practicing by choosing my melodic embellishments in advance... I am practicing playing shapes I am familiar with and thinking ahead towards targets I recognize... when I truly improvise in the "zone" I am in a state of mind where I am just in the "flow" (see Wiki). I am too relaxed to pre-hear/feel and pre-plan, that should have been done earlier when I practiced, which I still do.

There are only 6 melodic embellishments of the "target notes" in jazz music, plus the double, and triple enclosures (the Mt. Everest of jazz melody embellishment and the key , imo). I pre-hear or pre-plan these in slow motion when I practice.
Then there is also the particular way or tendency that each diatonic note in the major and minor scale has towards its resolution to the Tonic. I hear/feel these.
I am somewhat amazed that jazz education is so undeveloped and keeps jazz students in the dark about the physics of melody, and instead leads people to continuously pull at straws with advice such as play this scale on this chord and that scale on that chord... .

Flow, also known as Zone, is the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. In essence, flow is characterized by complete absorption in what one does. Proposed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, this positive psychology concept has been widely referenced across a variety of fields.[1]
According to Csikszentmihalyi, flow is completely focused motivation. It is a single-minded immersion and represents perhaps the ultimate experience in harnessing the emotions in the service of performing and learning. In flow, the emotions are not just contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand. The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task[2] although flow is also described (below) as a deep focus on nothing but the activity – not even oneself or one's emotions.

Components of flow:

1. intense and focused concentration on the present moment
2. merging of action and awareness
3. a loss of reflective self-consciousness
4. a sense of personal control or agency over the situation or activity
5. a distortion of temporal experience, one's subjective experience of time is altered
6. experience of the activity as intrinsically rewarding, also referred to as autotelic experience

Those aspects can appear independently of each other, but only in combination do they constitute a so-called flow experience.

By hear I mean, "singing in my head"... for example, if I listen to a backing track... I can scat or sing an improvised melody on top... So for a soloist... I imagine the same mental process takes place, but instead of using his vocal chords, he plays the solo on his instrument... that's what I mean by hearing in his head... Meaning he is playing exactly what he wants to play as he's playing it (there's no time lag between his brain and his hands)... every note is deliberate...

I can't imagine this process happening simultaneously with melody, bass and chords... But I'm wondering if this does happen with jazz pianists.

Thanks for the info rinticop. Still feels very mysterious to me.

The bass hand tends to go on autopilot... or if I listen intensely to the bass hand my right hand tends to go on autopilot. I hear the sum effect... with a greater focus on the melody and rhythm...

Improv is spontaneous composition. We hear in the moment. We play what we know and we think ahead...

Ah... thanks. This helps a lot. It sounds like the left hand works more through muscle memory and subconscious recollection (of patterns like stride)... and conscious mind is more free to work on the right hand.

piano_stride,

the answer to your question depends very much on level and experience. muscle memory and autopilot and such have a part to play. but as we get comfortable with what we're playing and as we hear what we're playing more deeply (which is something that comes from experience) then we can shape it and do more with it. so, yes, the answer to you question is really experienced improvising pianists hear what they play, voicings and all. i mean, keith jarrett, dave mckenna, fred hersch, etc. they're hearing it all ....

but presuming to speak for top-level of pianists–or worse to say we "KNOW" what they're doing is risky. so i've always found it helpful to find interviews with great pianists and then look to see what they say about "hearing what they play." fred hersch has talked about it .. so you might do some googling to see what he's said about it.

....your question comes up all the time at the beginning of the learning curve in jazz. and it is a great question. so it's also worth remembering in the beginning of a learning curve we can't always imagine all of the great stuff that's possible at the piano or at any instrument. but over time our ideas about what's possible and what we can do and accomplish change. over time we learn more about how to do whatever it is we're practicing. then things get easier. "playing what we hear" falls into that category. but, i'd also say "playing what we hear" isn't just limited to jazz musicians. "hearing what we play" is a skill all musicians develop over time. the thing is, when we can "hear" something internally we generally play it really well. if we can't hear it internally and we're trying to play it's not really a workable situation ...

some books that put some of this in perspective are Ran Blake's "The Primacy of the Ear" and Paul Berliner's "Thinking in Jazz."

some pianists to check out who can change the way we think about "hearing what we play" as we improvise are dave mckenna, craig taborn (he doesn't get mentioned on these forums that much but he's a monster), keith jarrett, and fred hersch. they're all pianists who have strong two-handed solo piano conceptions. of course there are many others who could be named and claire fischer is one of them. and bill evans. and lennie tristano. earl hines ..

so, going back to the beginning of the thread - it's totally worth working to as a goal. and it's totally worth putting right at the top of the list as a goal. and mentioning dave mckenna once more .... check him out as an example of an improvising pianist who's playing a two-handed style where each hand is contributing to the texture (rather than one hand doing most of the work).

i hope this helps ...!

pianolearnerstride , Your question may be given to other people: actors theatrical improvisation. Since music is a language, much of the speech mechanism is involved in music creation ; but there are also features .

This is completely an illusion that the brain and hand work simultaneously; they are "almost" the same time. Try to remember how long it took you to write the single letter from memory when asked the teacher at the beginning of learning to write . And how long does it take now? Multiple repetitive process is shortened over time and is automated so that the consciousness of it is unloaded. Involved here are different types of memory: auditory, muscular, tactile, visual, logical, etc. . All the exhaust process is so fast that we can not even pay attention to him. Here's a tiny example (I hope You're playing a piano): Put your finger on the key without pressing, soundlessly - you feel a slight contraction of the vocal cords and in your head will sounds quiet some pitch . This is called ideomotor effect -- link between tactility of pianist and his inner ear that is generated in the process of learning piano. You used to pay attention to this ?

  Improviser touch of a key , start to play - It turns out a phrase; if it has touched another key - phrase is another. This is due to melodic patterns that are stored in the pianist memory , but also with the different fingering patterns. All mixed very closely and occurs very quickly.

The same applies to the left hand, so it requires a separate work. Coordination problems of hands on the piano - one of the difficult problems of piano technique, but polyphonists - improvisers (Bach et al.) were engaged in problems of coordination between the hands in improvisation. And in jazz - I do not know who approached it methodically. Art Tatum, Earl Hines, Dave McKenna, Jarrett and Mehldau ,Dave Frank do it practically. I personally researched the mechanism of simultaneous both hands improvisation, and found something that I use.

In general we can say the following: improviser consciously hears only part of what is playing; and the rest is under the control of the subconscious. However, this requires pre-conscious work pianist of all necessary elements.

Definitely. Although there is hearing and then there is hearing. I can hear Swahili but I can't understand it. We should strive not only for internal hearing but also for an understanding. A sound is not just a sound but a piece of a puzzle that needs to be understood in a wider context, a line or a phrase or a melody or a solo which relates somehow with the structure of the piece.

It comes with practice and training - training insofar as learning patterns, doing variations on them, embellishing them and understanding the piece's framework (number of measures before repetition etc...). Since most patterns and their relationship to the piece's framework are easily memorizable, and assuming that your fingers and hands and have sufficient independence, it then comes naturally.

One trouble with this is that it is quite possible to learn licks and when to play them and how to play them without ever engaging the 'hearing' section of the brain, and for some people the hearing process is not something which develops by itself without a lot of work. We can all improve our ears and putting in the work in this area really results in a good payback imo.

I've tried to understand hearing before playing for a long time. I would read that Charlie Parker could hear eight bars ahead. Listen to Dena DeRose play You Stepped out of Dream. I couldn't find full version to share but here's a Link and you can hear a few bars at very end. Is she hearing the solo she's scatting too? BTW I just discovered her by this cut and have been digging her ever since.

Rarely do I hear before I play, which can play on my mind if I let it. I just feel something that says "just play and it will work out." This is really the part I find fun. An example would be soloing and I hit a note, but it didn't sound like I thought it was supposed to. At this point I have to intervene and go in a different direction. For the most part all the practicing and listening takes over and I find a new avenue. My job, as I see it, is to convince the listener that I meant it. I think you get better at it with practice and especially on the band stand. This concept, IMO, is why some classically trained pianists falter when they say they can't improvise, cause they're not used to jumping off cliffs.

I also think sequences and repeating a phrase are popular in jazz improvisation cause you might not hear the initial notes but once they are played you use them as the core and extrapolate the next few bars, etc. using this known quantity.

It is, IMO, the many years wood shedding, listening, transcribing and taking lessons and most of all developing your own way to organize all this in a way that your unconscious mind can draw from it, in the heat of the battle on the bandstand. I can't speak for the gifted musicians who hears symphonies in their head.

Great thread. Lots of good insight being shared here. Thanks, everyone.

Thanks everyone for the replies. Does make things clearer for me.

When I listened to Miles got the same impression :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaZJCAGQ8Vc
0:50 - 0: 57 compared to the 0:58 - 1:04 and then 1:05 - 1:12



I fell in love with her from the first listen, besides it looks like my student ...

.This can be both: cooked or unprepared improvisation.

I can assure You - You hear! You hear a very important part of the melody, even more important than pitches: melodic intonation!





During work on improvisation we do 3 different things :
  1 study licks
   2 learn to connect them
3 learn fluidity improvise.

  1 and 2 requires a mind control, 3 requires mind disabling .

Nahum, thanks for critiquing me comments. That's real nice of you especially since I've heard you play. I did find your thread about playing fast interesting. At first it appeared you were more student than teacher but then after hearing you it was apparent you DO understand about playing fast. You're just looking for a certain rhythm perfection and you were seeking out other opinions on the subject. I, on the other hand like imperfection. It goes with who I am. To be a little clearer, If there's a technique or rhythm flaw in my phrasing, I'm fine with it, as long as the lines makes sense and are interesting.

These threads really help understand music a little clearer. I've especially enjoyed this one and all the participants responses. Thank you.

It's a combination of both a cerebral effort and hearing it. Which way you lean more towards depends on how long you've been playing (in the beginning stages it's more cereberal), and how natural it comes to you (how much talent you have, how good your ear is, whatever you want to call it). For the vast majority of musicians, there's always elements of both. Those for whom it's a career or profession and have been doing it for years and years will of course find themselves mostly playing by ear (but not always). Even for these folks, when you learn a new tune, particularly something that doesn't fit into the "standard" mold, they will need to consciously sit down and figure it out. Here's the classic example: the tune "Lush Life." This is something that throws people for a loop all the time. That's because it's not the typical chord progression. So if you go into a bar and request it, most pianists have to take out the Real Book and fumble their way through it.