“So bye, bye Miss American Pie/ Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry” and them good ol’ boys weren’t singing.

When you practice improv regularly you reach points where you run dry.

Your ideas are lame, or redundant. Your voice sounds funny. You’ve got nothing to say. What you say is trite. Here’s a list of ideas to put the zing back in your singing.

1. Get outside … take a walk, go for a run, lie in the grass
2. Watch a foreign film (subtitles optional)
3. If you have a digital camera, take photos that disguise well-known items
   (i.e super close, upside down)
4. Rearrange or restyle a song you love
5. Make up a melody for a poem you like
6. Take a paragraph from a book you’re reading and sing it
7. Create a drum solo with your voice and body
8. Flip through a photo book and sing what you see
9. Learn to sing a solo improvised by someone else
   (i.e. Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, James Moody)
10. Put on a rockin’ _________ (R&B, blues, jazz, Appalachian, etc.) tune and try to imitate all the instruments in the band.