Not just for songwriters! In my humble opinion, improv games are great for most everyone:
- Musicians in general
- Creatives with writer’s block (self-censorship)
- People with social anxiety
- People with chronic negativity
- Singles who want to learn playful flirting skills
- Couples who want to play more than they fight
- Assholes and people who have to deal with assholes
What is Improv?
Improv is a kind of theater in which actors improvise dialogue and scenarios, often based on audience suggestions.
A central technique is the Yes, And… practice. This doesn’t necessarily mean agreeing with a given situation – just accepting the reality and adding to it. (This is similar to the blending practice in Aikido; the martial artist blends with the attack and channels it in a new direction.)
A common Improv saying is “Mistakes are gifts.” When a musical soloist makes a mistake (which, face it, we all do, especially me), they can come to a dead stop, run away screaming, pretend it didn’t happen, or incorporate the mistake into what they play next. With any luck, the mistake sounds intentional – unexpected yet inevitable. Happy accidents ‘r’ us! (Many of us, anyway.)
The ultimate goal of improv training is nothing less than a rewiring of one’s fundamental stance in life, using humor and play to develop a more yes-oriented relationship to the world. Improv games, in particular, are accessible techniques for incorporating such lessons into daily life.
Improv Games
Improv training usually begins with seemingly-simple games. For example:
- Reaction-time games that speed up until you screw up, to get you past the fear of leaping into the abyss
- Taking turns adding a word or sentence to what came before (similar to the Surrealists’ Exquisite Corpse game)
- Incorporating audience or instructor suggestions (for example, talking for five minutes about an experimental kite or a green doughnut factory)
What does this have to do with songwriting?
Songwriting is part craft and part listening to the muse.
Craft
SongwriterHelper games like Randomizer provide suggestions (as an audience might), to help you practice your craft without waiting for the perfect inspiration.
- What can you do with a random song title, a random chord progression, a random Shakespeare quote?
- How fast can you write a crappy song?
- How many ways can you appeal to the five or more senses?
- How many different melodies can you come up with for a set of lyrics or chords?
- Can you get over the creativity-blocking idea that every song has to be the next big hit?
Listening to the Muse
The Muse is moody, flaky, and unreliable, and if you keep saying no to her, she may stop speaking altogether.
Fortunately, we have ways to encourage her to talk.
Stream-of-consciousness (automatic writing) games involve writing or talking without blocking your thoughts. Say yes to whatever pops in your head and write it down. Rinse and repeat.
Some of the timed games in SongwriterHelper (or whatever we end up calling it) flash a words-per-minute score if you stop writing for too long, to encourage you to put it all out there and edit later. The goal is to learn to write as fast as you can think, or even faster.
Check it out at SongwriterHelper.com.
(For way more about improv, Aikido, etc., see my article, “‘Yes, and’: Acceptance, Resistance, and Change in Improv, Aikido, and Psychotherapy,” https://www.sfxmachine.com/docs/yes,_and.pdf )