Friday, 11/01/2024

Impro-Visor (short for Improvisation Advisor) is a music notation program designed to help jazz musicians compose and hear solos similar to ones that might be improvised. The objective is to improve understanding of solo construction and tune chord changes. * Lead sheets and solos can be constructed through either point-and-click or using a plain text editor (one is provided, but any editor can be used). Solos or solo fragments can be played back immediately on the computer, with chord accompaniment. * It is not necessary that the soloist memorize the solos that are created in Impro-Visor. Rather the act of constructing solos is supposed to help one get a better understanding of the tune and of solo construction. But one can use some, if not all, of the ideas from the solos constructed, as many outstanding players have done for generations. * Impro-Visor also provides a way for the user to create and save licks for later use. Lick creation is helpful in understanding how to construct interesting lines over chord changes. * When used for transcription, Impro-Visor allows easy mining of selected licks from a solo for future reference. * Impro-Visor uses dynamic menus in the form shown to help one choose notes, cells, idioms, licks, and quotes for use in constructing a solo. * Musical knowledge about chords, scales, licks, etc. are definable by the user, in the form of a vocabulary text file. These items are defined in a single key, and Impro-Visor will transpose them to any key. * Impro-Visor saves solos and other lead sheets as free-form text. We call this leadsheet notation. Although a point-and-click interface is provided, users can optionally enter chords and/or melody in this notation with a standard text editor and have them displayed as a lead sheet in Impro-Visor. The documentation tells how to create and interpret the notation. The notation also provides slash-chords and polychords. * The release of Impro-Visor comes with a few leadsheets with melodies, a number of sample solos, transcriptions, and The Imaginary Book, a large set (over 1600) of chords-only lead sheets for standard and jazz tunes.

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