Like any other skill, you get better at improvisation by doing it a lot. The most important thing is that you can do it at all. Many muscians can't.

I have a lot of different techniques for improvising, depending on the type of music that's being played, the other musicans present, my mood, the instrument I'm playing, and my current state of mental clarity. Often, I am pretty much in the scales. If you know the scale for the chord that is being played and can imagine a melody, you can just go with that. It requires you to be mentally present so you can keep track of the chord changes, although a lot of songs/genres of music don't really go outside of one scale even when they change chords.

Simple chord patterns can use the pentatonic scales and require less paying attention to the details. For me at least, that means I can give more attention to coming up with nice melodic phrases. It also means I can be fairly mindless with it if I want (or need) to be. I often seem to find myself in an Em pentatonic scale -- E, G, A, B, D, E. This will work well over any song with the chords of Em, D, G, A, Am, or Bm -- in short, half the rock songs in the world. Switch the G to a G# in the scale if you need to be in a major key.

I suppose I have the tool bag of tricks that Rick was talking about, although I don't really think about it that way. That part of it happens on an unconscious level now, but I seem to remember in my deep dark past sitting and working out things that sound good and then practicing them over and over.

Getting the feel of the music you are improvising to is as important as getting the right notes. The nuances of timing and "feel" are different for different genres of music and wil probably take you farther toward sounding good than knowing exactly what scale to play. You can improvise off of three notes if you have to, as long a they fit the rhythm and style of the music.

Although I play jazz a bit, and have been playing the blues since I was a kid, and spent many years playing in rock bands, I am really a player of tradtional folk music and as such am more turned on by a beautiful melody than by anything else. When I improvise, one of my goals is to make melody, not just a bunch of notes that happen to fit the song harmonically and rhythmically. There is a room in hell all prepared for me with saxophones playing atonal jazz improvisations.

John Peekstok