How to Improvise Christmas Music

Welcome and Happy Holidays to everyone. Today's subject is how to improvise Christmas music. A lot of times if you're a pianist you're going to be called into action to accompany people playing Christmas songs or people just want you to play something. Maybe you don't want to practice a whole bunch of Christmas carols so what I suggest is find the easiest arrangements you can. I got this one right off of Virtual Sheet Music and there's a bunch of easy piano arrangements. What's great about it is you can embellish them and improvise.

So this is a little study in improvisation here and Christmas carols are one of the best ways to do it. Why? Because when you improvise music it's best to have music that you can pretty much play by ear because that's what improvisation's all about. This gives you a great starting point if you don't know the music intimately you can at least read a simple version and fancy it up. Let me show you what I mean.

First I'm going to play it as it's written and then I'm going to embellish and show you just what the possibilities are. And this way you can do it on your level you can do it with people who are singing or solo whatever you like. It's totally flexible. That's the beauty of it. So this is Greensleeves sometimes called What Child is This and this is the easy arrangement in Virtual Sheet Music.

Now you can do pretty much whatever you want with it and in fact you could just take the left hand and make up a melody totally fresh and take off on this song and create your own song based upon the descending harmonies in the left.

So the only rule here is have fun with the music. All right? And you can do this with many simple Christmas songs or any songs at all. Gives yourself a chance to improvise with something you're intimately familiar with which is the secret to improvisation. When you hear the jazz greats taking off on something you wonder how is it possible to create these masterpieces of composition instantly? Well the secret is they've lived with the music so much that it's a part of them.

So that's why Christmas songs are a perfect way for you to get started with improvisation if it's something new for you because it's familiar songs.

Thanks for joining me enjoy the holiday season and I'll see you next time on virtualsheetmusic.com and living pianos.com. Your host Robert Estrin.

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