The basics of improvisation on the ocarina

If you watch someone experienced with improvisation, it could appear that they are just pulling a melody from thin air. However, that's not how it works. Improvising music on the ocarina is a lot like speaking a language. When you speak in your native language, you don't assemble words a letter at a time. Rather, you think in concepts, and sentences 'just happen'.

Learning how to improvise means learning the conceptual 'words' of melody and rhythm, as well as the basic structures of melody to assemble those words into a 'musical conversation'. Like any skill, it's essential to start with the basics.

The pentatonic scale

The pentatonic scale is an awesome place to start learning to improvise on the ocarina. As the name implies, pentatonic scales are five-note scales. They are special as they allow you to play any note over any scale chord, and the result won't sound bad.

You can hear what the C major pentatonic scale sounds like below.

The first step in learning to improvise is learning the scale. Much of improvisation is acting on instinct, so it's extremely important to practice the scale until you no longer need to think about it:

• Practice moving through the notes of the scale in linear order, from the lowest note to the highest, and back down.
• Practice leaping through the notes of the scale with different intervals.

Some exercises for practising the scale and intervals are provided below. They have been created for the range of an alto C ocarina, but feel free to transpose them if you are playing an ocarina in G or another key:

Pentatonic scale (for single alto C)

Pentatonic intervals 1:

Pentatonic intervals 2:

Pentatonic intervals 3:

Backing tracks

Once you've got the basics of moving between the notes in the scale, have a shot at playing them over a chord backing track. It's super easy to find a large assortment of these on websites like YouTube by searching for 'C major backing track' or 'C major jam track'.

Just mess around with the notes of the pentatonic scale over the chords, and see how it sounds:

• Hold each note as a long tone and listen to how they sound over different chords.
• Try creating melodies, such as playing a quarter note rhythm and using different notes.

Improvising with a backing track can be a lot of fun, and it's a great way of learning to play in tune.

Melodic figures

If you just randomly play notes from the scale, you may find that the music sounds a bit dull, like it's just wandering around with no reason.

One of the things that makes music sound like music is structure and repetition. Improvisers don't usually work with single notes, but make use of melodic figures – short melodic patterns, which are repeated. We will be starting with just one figure, one bar in 4/4:

Have a go at forming different figures, for example: how does it sound when the notes in the figure are all close together, vs farther apart?

Its super useful to listen to other people to get figure ideas. Perhaps listen to someone improvising and try to identify the common patterns they use. Also, do the same for other music; you don't need to learn figures just from improvisation.

Improvising a melody

Like figures, melodies on a larger scale often exhibit structure. For example, the number of bars in a melody often follows the powers of two: 2, 4, 8, 16, or 32 bars.

Further still, within this structure, there is often another overarching structure called call-and-response. You have one melodic phrase that's the call, then a second melodic phrase that's the response. It's like asking a question and getting an answer.

You may notice that the response here is actually the same figure shifted up in the scale. In its base form, the pattern consists of the notes C, D, E, C. If you shift it up by one 1 in the scale, you'd get the notes D, E, G, D. The previous example shows the figure shifted up three steps.

Have a play around with improvising melodies using calls, responses, and shifting the same figure around in the scale. You may get something like this:

Adding variation

But using just one melody fragment, it can sound a bit dull, right? So you can add a second one for some variation. The goal is to find complementary figures: contrary motion (ascending vs descending), or mirroring, which tend to sound good. Also, try experimenting with the rhythms within the figures.

Introducing this figure in a few places to the previous melody results in this. The thing here is not to go overboard introducing variations. Add a small number of variations and see how it sounds, then experiment from there.

Take notes of the functions of figures in music. A sequence of ascending or descending notes creates an expectation that the following notes will be higher or lower. Repeating a single note, on the other hand, tends to create a sense of resolution.

What's next?

That's the absolute basics of improvisation, and you now know enough to experiment with improvisation and possibly start introducing some variations when playing other people's music. If you'd like to learn more, looking up the following is a great place to start:

• Other common melody structures.
• Improvising with seven-note scales.
• How chord progressions work, and how different notes work with different chords.

And listen to other musicians. See if you can hear any figures. Is the melody following common structures, such as call-and-response?