Break Free from Familiar Licks: Creative Improvisation Practice Technique for Musicians
Improvisation can feel impossible when you sit down with your instrument and try to conjure something brilliant out of thin air. The more you reach for what you “know,” the more it seems to evaporate, just like when someone asks you to list ten of your favorite songs and suddenly you can’t name even three. This post is about a simple, repeatable practice routine that sidesteps that mental block and helps you break free from familiar licks while deepening your ear, your theory, and your imagination.
Why composing solos matters
A lot of students hear “practice improvisation” and imagine looping a tune and hoping inspiration strikes. That usually leads right back to muscle memory: the same phrases, the same comfort‑zone patterns, the same ruts.
Composing solos on paper is a different kind of practice. You are still dealing with real harmony, voice‑leading, chord tones, and tension, but you are not relying on your hands to tell you where to go next. You are giving your ear and your imagination the steering wheel, then later training your technique to execute those ideas instead of the other way around.
Step 1: divination for chord progressions
The first obstacle in practicing improvisation is deciding what to play over. If you sit there scrolling through tunes in your mind, you can waste a lot of time and end up not committing to anything.
To get past that, use a kind of musical divination. Go to your shelf, grab a real book or any songbook, and pick a random page. The rule is important: you do not flip around looking for a “good” tune or a comfortable key. The first page you land on is the one you work with. You then choose a manageable slice of that tune—say 8, 12, or at most 16 bars—ideally a self‑contained phrase or section bounded by double bar lines.
At this point, ignore the melody in the book. Your only concern is the chord progression and where the chords change.
Step 2: copy the harmony by hand
Next, copy that short progression onto a fresh piece of paper with blank staves. Use staff paper, a pen or pencil, and write out the bar lines and chords by hand.
There are a couple of reasons to stay away from notation software for this exercise. When you write by hand, you slow down just enough to really think and audiate—to hear internally—what you are putting on the page. You are building a direct connection between the visual (notes on staff), the theoretical (what those notes are doing harmonically), and the aural (what they sound like in your inner ear), before your fingers ever touch the instrument.
As you copy, pay attention to the rate of harmonic change. Mark not only which chord is in each measure, but also which beat it changes on so you’re capturing the actual rhythmic shape of the harmony. A bar with two beats of one chord and two beats of another feels different than a bar with one chord held for the full measure, and your lines should respond to that.
Step 3: choose modes and scales intentionally
Once the chords are on the page, you now have an empty canvas below them where your solo will live. This is where chord‑scale relationships become very practical.
Grab a cheat sheet, if you have one, listing modes and scales that pair well with different chord types and harmonic functions. Because this is a practice room, not a performance, go slow. Take each chord and ask, “What are two or three modes or scales I could try over this?”
This is also a great moment to stretch beyond your default language. Maybe there’s a mode you almost never use but “mean to get to someday.” Put it in the rotation here. You can even write the name of the mode or scale under each chord, like a roadmap, so you are consciously deciding how you want to color each harmony.
The point is not to show off exotic theory for its own sake. It’s to cultivate a flexible sense of color: learning how subtle shifts in scale choice can change the mood, tension, and contour of the same underlying progression.
Step 4: sketch a skeleton melody
Before you start spraying fast sixteenth notes onto the page, start simple. Think of this as drawing the skeleton of your solo.
Put in a single melodic line that clearly outlines the chords. Aim for strong chord tones on important beats, and don’t be afraid of space. You can use longer note values, small rhythmic gestures, and clear melodic direction. You are asking, “If this solo were just the bare bones of melody, what would make the harmony feel inevitable and satisfying?”
Focus, too, on tension notes—those interesting upper extensions or scale degrees that create color when they resolve. This is where your earlier scale choices come to life: you’re hearing how that ninth, sharp eleven, or thirteen sits against the chord, and deciding deliberately where to place it.
At this stage, don’t worry about being flashy. Worry about being clear, melodic, and intentional.
Step 5: add ornamentation and detail
Once the skeleton melody is in place, then you can go back and dress it up. This is the phase where you think about connecting notes, small runs, turns, approach tones, and other devices that bring more movement and excitement into the line.
You might add passing tones between chord tones, insert short scalar fragments, or use chromatic approaches to lead into important notes. Each bit of ornamentation should support the underlying melody rather than bury it. The framework you built keeps the solo coherent even as you increase the surface activity.
It also helps to keep an “exploration mode” mindset here. There is no audience; there is no pressure to get it “right.” You’re trying ideas on paper, hearing them in your mind, and learning which gestures feel fresh to you and which ones you’ve leaned on too many times.
Step 6: play what you wrote
The last phase is to sit down with your instrument—guitar, piano, whatever you play—and bring the written solo to life. You do not need to be a flawless sight‑reader to get value from this.
Take your time reading through the solo until you can play it smoothly enough to hear it as music and not just an exercise. In doing this, you are training a crucial loop: your imagined lines on paper become real sound under your fingers, and your technique starts to adapt to musical ideas that did not originate in your usual physical habits.
This also gives you a way, any time you feel stuck, to inject something genuinely new into your vocabulary. You’re no longer limited to what your hands “already know.” You’ve built a process for seeding your playing with fresh lines that came from your ear and your theory, then bringing them back through the instrument.
Make it small, but make it regular
A common temptation with any new practice routine is to overdo it. You might feel inspired and want to write a chorus and a half of solo on your first pass.
Resist that. The power of this approach is not in cramming 32 or 64 bars into one marathon session; it’s in returning to a small slice of music consistently. Eight, twelve, or sixteen bars is plenty. That keeps the process focused and repeatable. Over weeks and months, those small written solos add up to a huge expansion of your melodic and harmonic vocabulary.
Most importantly, you now have a dependable way around that blank‑page feeling. Instead of staring at your instrument and hoping inspiration shows up, you walk to the shelf, pick a book, copy a few bars, and start writing. Little by little, you train yourself to hear deeper, think more clearly about chords and modes, and create solos that truly sound like your own voice—on paper first, and then in the air.