Hello,
I am new to IFR. I am about 4 years into learning to play the pedal steel guitar. The concept of learning to improvise presented by IFR seems quite intuitive to me, in general. I have learned much of what is presented in the first exercises of the method early on. Being able to identify the key of any song and singing or playing a song in any key (provided my vocal cords allow it) are skill I already have. And, I can move pretty freely across and up and down the the fretboard to find the notes I’m looking for. So, I wasn’t too concerned that the earliest interval exercises were less applicable to the pedal steel due to the pedals and levers affects on the relative intervals. Are there any others here that play the steel or have experienced a similar situation? Will there be many other exercises that are not suitable or need to be greatly modified in order to get the most benefit from the method? Thanks.
Hi @Cybervet. Welcome to the forum.
I’m not sure if there are any other pedal steel players here.
There are however other ‘less common’ instruments. My own instrument of choice is the Chapman Stick. Essentially it’s a fretboard with strings tuned in fairly regular intervals (not necessarily 4ths - there are lots of possible tunings), so some of the guitar & bass ideas can be adopted & adapted, but not all of them because a Stick is not played in the same way a guitar or bass are.
However, by looking at the general concepts behind the IFR ideas & exercises I’ve yet to find anything I can’t apply & find useful in some way. I guess you could say that those of of us with less common instruments need to improvise in more senses than the obvious one? LOL!
I wish you joy in your explorations. 