Chords for THE LESSON BY MARCUS MILLER : How to improvise a solo

[G] _ _ _ [B] _ [A] _ [C] _ _ _
[Bb] _ [D] _ _ [G] _ _ _ For me, with a solo, the difficult part is the first thing you play.
How do I start my solo?
Because once I get started, everything else is just a natural _ reply to what I played earlier.
But that first one, you gotta grab that out of the air.
So I know I'm sitting there going_
_ And I know I have a solo coming up and [Bb] I'm going, I don't have any idea what [C] I'm going
to do yet, I don't know.
And the drummer goes, I _ [Em] _ [Bm] go_
[Gbm] Because he happened to give me a little idea.
So what you have to do, [D] or at least what I have to do, is just stay open.
Just keep my ears open, keep my eyes open.
Maybe there's a lady with a funny hat in the audience, you [Am] go_
[F] Because it just made you, put you in a certain mood.
So you want to get, at least I want to get to a point where I'm free enough just to be
able to react to whatever's happening.
And I think the audience knows when you're in that space.
They can see that you're playing something that is created right now.
You know what I mean?
They feel it, you feel it, and you're just [Ab] turning that feeling into music.
I think that's cool.
When you first start trying to improvise, you think about the chords.
[G] Right?
Because if there's a certain chord, [E] right?
If you hear_
You know there's a certain scale, a certain amount of notes that you can use, a certain
set of notes that you can use that sound good against it.
_ [Gbm] _ [E] _ [Abm] _
[E] _ [N] _ So you think about scales, you think about chords, you think about the details of music.
You get to the next level, and you're not thinking about that so much because it's automatic.
So you're thinking about other things.
You're thinking about whatever.
And that whatever is the cool thing, when you're thinking about whatever comes to mind.
The musicians I respect the most have incredible imagination.
And they have an incredible ability to create.
And they have an incredible ability to transfer what they hear in their head to the instrument.
If you hear George Benson play the guitar, lots of times he sings along with the guitar
because he's got such a connection between what he's doing and what he's playing.
And you hear a lot of musicians doing that.
Some musicians, they don't have a microphone.
But if you're standing next to them, you can hear them doing the same thing.
I remember a guitar player who said to me,
I don't understand why, man, but after every time I solo, my throat hurts.
And I said, well, I'm standing next to you.
You don't realize it, but you're going, _
You're singing while you're playing.
He was playing so loud because it [F] was a rock style that he couldn't hear that he was singing.
But he did realize that his throat hurt after his solo.
So I think it's really important to try to develop a connection.
A lot of [Am] musicians, they haven't developed that part of their musicality.
They play with their fingers.
So if you're a bass player and you hear a beat,
they just go, they just start moving their fingers. _ _ _ _
So that works sometimes, but sometimes it's cool for you to hear the beat _ _
and go
and just be _ [N] able to imagine something cool and then play it on your instrument.
The advantage of that is that your imagination isn't limited to what you can play.
With jazz, with music that's improvised,
I think you've got to get away from thinking that you're going to play it perfectly.
[F] In classical music, everybody's concerned about flawless.
But when we hear jazz musicians who play without any mistakes,
it's a little bit boring.
Because if you're playing with no mistakes,
that means you're not pushing yourself as hard as you can.
You're not stretching your imagination.
You're not searching in your imagination as hard as you [G] could.
And then there are other musicians, you can tell they're amazing musicians,
but they'll listen and something crazy will happen
because they're out there on the edge.
And that's what makes it exciting.
And I think people who are watching, they react to that.
They go, oh, I don't know if he meant to do that.
But there's no mistakes, okay?
Unless you decided it's a mistake.
If you're playing, I mean, I've had things, man, where I'm like,
I've got it.
_ That note that [Gb] doesn't quite_
And I hit it, I [G] go_
[E] _ _ [N] _ _ _ _
[E] _ If you just give yourself, say, hey, that's not what I [Gm] meant to do,
but that's kind of cool.
That's not what I meant to do, but I'm going to make something out of that.
And then it becomes really exciting.
[N] _ _ _
_ _ _ [G] _ _ _ [Ab] _ [A]
[Em] Thank you.
_ _ [D] _ _ [Em] _ _ _