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Comment by kirse | Hacker News Reader

Yes, but you probably won't be any good.

I started piano when I was 23/24 with the goal of wanting to play Jazz / improvise and quickly realized that the biggest challenge is lacking the technical skills to translate the "mental orchestra" onto the keys.

Especially before bed my mind wanders and produces these amazing Blues/Jazz riffs or Moonlight Sonata-esque ideas, but my talent is far behind my taste when it comes to either trying to play or even transcribing all that I "hear"... at least without significant manual effort.

So yeah, maybe that just confirms what you're saying, but what I realized around year 1 was that "improvisation" is really just a musician's bag of technical skills/tricks combined together in their own unique ways... And ultimately the more technical capability you have, the more "improv" things will appear.

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After a few years, if you practice quite a bit, you get to where if you can hear it in your head, you can more or less automatically translate that to finger movements. A seasoned player doesn't really have to think much about the mechanics. You think a melody, and then it comes out.

That doesn't mean that composing becomes automatic -- often once you cross that chasm, there's still frustration between having an abstract musical idea, and translating it into actual notes. Also, by that time, the way you listen to music has changed pretty drastically, and you also realize that a lot of your own ideas are mundane in comparison to the things you can half-way understand in music that you listen to. That's where most of the work actually happens -- in becoming better at thinking about musical ideas.

If you're able to sing the ideas that you've got, I'd recommend recording yourself singing them, and then spending the time learning to play those ideas. That at least lets you work on the gap that you mentioned between thought and mechanics in a concrete way.

For most instrumentalists though, myself included, you pretty quickly get to where you can play things more easily than you can sing them. If you ask a trumpeter to sight-sing a piece of music, you'll usually see them miming the hand movements because they can imagine how it will sound when they play something, and work backwards from there to singing.

> Especially before bed my mind wanders and produces these amazing Blues/Jazz riffs or Moonlight Sonata-esque ideas, but my talent is far behind my taste when it comes to either trying to play or even transcribing all that I "hear"... at least without significant manual effort.

Double down on ear-training, it'll take you a long way toward being able to being able to automatically translate the imaginary sounds into real play.

I've just started playing piano and I've been really inspired by pianowithjonny.com. It's an excellent web site, well worth the $20 or so per month for monthly membership so you get access to all his courses (put in your email address and get a discount code).

I just started his Blues Bible course[1]. Maybe that could help speed you up. It's tons of riffs to help get you improvising. But yeah, he says riffs are basically just a bag of tricks you can dip into.

[1] https://pianowithjonny.com/products/bible-of-blues-riffs-vol...

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