Practicing

In the practice room today I came up with a few ideas when practicing improv.

* For rhythm, I set up a beat (tapping my foot) and tried to fill a certain number of beats (4 or 6 depending on the feel/time signature I'm trying to get at) with as many interesting and different rhythms as possible, just playing mainly open strings on the violin.

* For technique, I practiced double stops (two notes at once on the violin), which I should normally do but don't. Good thing my violin teacher isn't reading this. I played the usual thirds, sixths, and octaves, then the less-traditional tritone.

* Finally, I played around with All Blues, trying out things I wouldn't try in public. I want to integrate better technique into my improvisation, because I always tend to play things that are easy for me, all single notes and nothing too high up the fingerboard. I tried integrating double stops into All Blues and that required figuring out what intervals work well. I don't write anything down when I improvise, because I'm afraid it will make me play the same thing when I do actually try to improvise. However, it doesn't seem to be a problem - I'm getting happier with my improv over All Blues with each successive practice session, so something must be sticking.