Why You Should Improvise With Other People

Oct 6

Hey friends,

If you are anything like me, chances are high that you spend a lot of your time making music all by yourself. That's fine for being creative, but at some point you get stuck in your own concepts. For me, nothing opens my mind like making music with other people. On September 25th, I had the chance to play an improvised ambient set with the extremely talented Fabian Laute in a church, and this week's Melodic Minute is a live recording from our final rehearsal session.

Improvising with another person is a completely different beast

Improvising alone is already challenging. But improvising live on stage with another person is a completely different level, because suddenly it's all about the fine nuances. But most of all, it is about giving each other space: When one person plays their way into the foreground, the other pulls back. And when the other pulls back, you need the courage to step forward with your sound and take that space. And I think that works best when it happens spontaneously.

I'm trying to get out of my head

One of the biggest topics I'm working on right now is overthinking. Going into creative work with a master plan, everything written down and analyzed, and executing it exactly as planned. And if it doesn't go as planned, it's wrong. I believe that approach is a big mistake, because something I only really learned recently is that creativity comes a lot from the subconscious. It's about feeling, spontaneity and trusting your gut.

And for me there is no better place for that than a joint live set. There is no plan to fall back on. You listen, react, feel and decide: this is so good right now, let's stay here a bit longer.

You can hear that in the SoundCloud set. At the start we were both a bit hesitant, but the longer we played, the more we got into that joint flow state. Suddenly you're not thinking "sound X is 3 dB too loud" anymore. If a sound pushes too far into the foreground, you just pull the fader down. And that's the part that's really, really fun.

And the room plays along

The room you play in makes a huge difference. In the church, the room sound was immense, so even simple things sounded bombastic. Listening back to our recording, some parts sound really minimal, but in there they felt massive. And with a static setlist, you have little chance to react to that room, or to the people in it.