This four-week course boosts your improv skills to help you create memorable songs - right in the moment. We'll overcome fears and learn tools to help you make what appears to be extremely difficult and astounding almost effortless. Confidence, structure, chorusing, rhyme, duets and common styles will be covered. What you'll learn can be used in any improv style, and can boost your songwriting skills as well.

Patrick Short, our Education Director and founder, has been making music since 1967, and teaching improv since 1984. He's a very experienced improv accompanist with lots of experience helping people overcome improv fears. Patrick plays in AlleyLoops, a music improv duo with Emily Larkin, and is the director/music director of Vision Euro at CSz Portland. Stage musical experience includes music direction for scripted musicals, including performances at the Kennedy Center, as well as Screaming Mee-Mees, who appeared at the Chicago Improv Festival, in New Orleans and Seattle. He has 8 albums to his credit this century (including The Traffic Safety Album and tell.short.gray's NorthEast Pacific) and writes all the music for Thinking People's Theatre shows.

Improv Music Basics (CSz 304)