I feel like I always fall into the same patterns and just play the same thing or just play songs from memory , and I feel like my fingers just dont help I cant convey what comes to my mind fast enough , do you have any suggestions to improve ?

 

Last edited: Aug 23, 2020

try humming it and record that? listen back to it and figure it out on piano, and then work on building an arrangement?

 

I find It's helpful and interesting to spend more time playing along with, jamming with, music that is NOT familiar to you.
Kicking yourself out of your comfort zone, and struggling, is a useful way to learn new tricks and techniques.

 

I have the same issues at times and start feeling musically stagnant, I stop listening to my favorite genres of music, and immerse myself into any style of music that I don't usually play. At that time I practice scales, patterns and try working out different chord inversions that stretch my fingers to the point of cramping and pain, this just to keep them limbered up and more responsive. I am a guitarist who usually plays Blues, Rock or just about anything that pops up at jam sessions, but I like to integrate my own ideas into the tunes to spice them up. To really improve your playing always take yourself out of your comfort zone, go to improvs and jam sessions where you don't know the other musicians, you may just surprise yourself with a new sense of creativity. It makes no difference what instrument you play creativity is paramount.
No, as someone insinuated I am not a beginner but have been playing Professionally for well over 40 years and was a session musician for shows that needed to hire local musicians to support the performers, artists who didn't want to travel with their own bands or musicians. I am retired from the hire scene and only play for my own pleasure at jam and improv clubs, but I will be soon doing studio sessions again but only as a favor for a friend who I've recorded with in the past.

 

Last edited: Aug 23, 2020

My suggestion for the improvement of your improvisation is that "don't fall into Jazz traps". They use this interest in enthusiasts and ruin their minds. Please take this advice so seriously.

 

Most of the time, if you are already a player, not a beginner, we get stuck at improvisation because at some point we play the same scales and our fingers are at the command instead of our inspiration.
To change this, as @Colin says, free yourself from your fingers and techniques, hum or sing you improvisation.
Record it and take new ideas from it.

At the same time, you can learn new scales and new ideas from your favorite players.
Listen and analyze the parts of their improvisations that you most like, and try to understand what is the logic, mechanism behind it, so you will not copy a riff, but you can inspire yourself from it's building and what you like from it.

 

Last edited: Aug 23, 2020

You could mash your hands around the keyboard like a jazz pianist, at some point you'll find something useful. Joking aside, like @Olymoon said try some different (or exotic) scales.

 

Another way to get to a new vision is to learn other's instruments lines. You play piano learn sax or guitar lines.

 

I found smoking a joint always helped.
The only problem was, I'd go so far out on a tangent that I'd often forget what the original song was

 

Improvisation can almost be said to be a dead art now. For centuries, this art was worked on, but with the beginning of the Romantic period, composers gradually preferred to replace this art with precise pre-composed ones. They committed the greatest betrayals to this sublime art.

In the twentieth century, a number of people in the United States tried to revive this art and created various genres of jazz, but it can be said that their efforts were in vain. Jazz was not an art based on the principles and rules of the past but just some arbitrarily-made disciplines by unfamiliar guys.

The genuine form of this art has almost been forgotten and one cannot expect great artists to reappear in this field.

 

Not sure what you mean by the 'genuine form' of this art. Improvisation can take many forms.
e.g., I don't think improvisation is culturally dead at all when we think of musicians improvising solo parts.
Maybe not 'very' popular but certainly not dead.
But I'd accept that improvisation is a lot less common today when we think of improvising form and structure
rather than just improvising melodic parts.

Coincidentally, exactly about this, a recent book on sister site "The Pianists Guide to Historic Improvisation" - nice book.
It's obviously not as immediate or practical hands-on as many of the suggestions above - it's far more abstract - but still interesting.
I've been browsing through it and I found some very nice ideas being discussed.

 

I know exactly what you mean. And after several failed attempts to expand my playing and feeling disgruntled that I was neither an undiscovered jazz great or a potential world class concert pianist, I decided to just hone the skills I had. I figured if Elton John can sustain a 50 year career using the same chord progressions and arpeggios and still generate music in almost every style from country to hard rock, classics to crap, then perhaps I can still find new music within my comfort zone.

 

Of course. You can also take the example of BB King who have been playing mostly one genre and 2 pentatonic scales in his all carrier.
But the question is, he was happy with that, what if op is not happy in the same situation?

 

You have to learn how to improvise improvisation.

In other words just relax and enjoy, press some unexpected key or a chord from time to time, try to follow it with another that somehow fits... with time you'll get better at it. I love to improvise. It is the key to getting new ideas and developing your own style.

 

This is very good advice. My instrument is the keyboard, but sometimes I will pick up a guitar or bass and despite being a very bad player, that habit of always sitting at a keyboard and placing your hands in familiar shapes is forgotten. New formations appear and you can then translate them to the keyboard.

 

I've always liked that mentality, from beginner to now, it just works! and there's a million ways of enjoying it.
Extending that 'improvisation' discussion to writing...
No matter how much music theory I embrace, all my writing is still entirely a hit and miss, trial and error exploration.
An hour of enthusiastic, and very wonky, improvisation (riddled with mistakes) might result in me refining just 30 seconds
of something interesting that I can then use in a song.
So, the only rule for me when exploring is do I like what I found.

Ages ago, I knew a trumpet player (not a pianist). The first time I met him he was sitting at a piano doing nothing except staring at both hands (10 digits) just resting (like he was paralysed) on the keyboard. He told me he would regularly walk up to a piano, close his eyes, place both hands randomly onto the keyboard and then just stare at it trying to work out 'what it might mean harmonically' and what he might be able to do with it on his trumpet.
Made me smile - just one of a million ways to play this wonderful game.