Funny you should mention that. After realising that the excitement of launching into a break was making me speed up and lose timing, I spent yesterday working out and practicing breaks to some of our newer songs: It did seem to be useful to figure out something that sounds good in context using the various ideas that are in my head somewhere: I'm definitely not good enough to have those ideas in my fingers, and to be able to reproduce them on the cuff. Also, once you get confident about the learned break, it seems to be easier to improvise off of that, or at least to develop it with other ideas.
But I speak as someone who is fumbling around with this! Also, what I realised recently is that in our group practices, we don't really practice solos, just play them: so we started doing each solo three times each time we play the song: I think it really helps to get that time to play something comfortably without the pressure of creating a masterpiece in the one moment you have available.... On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 2:19 PM, Val Mindel <[email protected]> wrote: > Anyone have advice on working up breaks? I'm feeling lame, in a wash > of post-gig angst on the subject. Singing is usually what I'm hired to > do, and I do lots of songs in less-than-friendly string keys (flat > keys, F#, like that). Obviously more practice is the ticket, but I > don't know how to practice. Should I create a break and then memorize > it or hope my musical vocabulary improves to the point I can spit out > something coherent in the moment. Oddly enough, I can usually manage a > fine or at least a passable off-the-cuff break in a jam, but when the > crunch comes all those good ideas seem inaccessible. val > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Taterbugmando" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]<taterbugmando%[email protected]> > . > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/taterbugmando?hl=en. > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Taterbugmando" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/taterbugmando?hl=en.
