How to develop EFFICIENT FINGERING for improvisation?

[musicioso]

Hallo dear members of the forum,

In order to improvise on several scales i need to develop good fingering. Doe you guys know some good exercises for me? I am already familiar with Hanon exercises, but those are not quit what i need. Do you know some other books?

To give you any idea of what i wanna play, i have some examples:

This is no piano, but i think there must be no difference in fingering as the keys are always the same..

[ted]

Do you mean you wish to play the instrument shown here, or do you mean you wish to play the piano in ways which imitate these idioms ? I assume the latter.

The left hand would appear to have to do the job of the tabla while the right mostly acts in place of the sitar. As a matter of fact I am very fond of this sort of music myself and I try to achieve the same effect quite often in various sections of my improvisation. It is a very exciting idiom and well worth the trouble of developing. The main issue would appear to be acquiring the knack of feeling two or three independent rhythms simultaneously. And it isn't even that simple, because most of the rhythms in these ragas cannot be meaningfully notated. By comparison I would have thought that fingerings would be relatively easy. As with much improvisation, except the very simple, optimal fingerings cannot be calculated in advance, so the trick is to get all fingers used to doing duty anywhere at a split second's notice.

What I do is usually think in terms of groups, movements or hand positions. Within any given group there exists an infinity of accented striking sequences. These forms are gradually embedded in the brain over time until they are so ingrained, and in such large variety that they spill out during improvisation to produce music which has life.

In a sense the technique is no different to the classical pianist's well known trick of separating passages into groups and microsleeps for the purpose of getting things smooth, effortless and fast. The very important difference is mainly that roughness and accidentally juxtaposed accents within the groups are sought after, and certainly permitted to occur - for improvisational surprise and excitement - rather than eschewed in the cause of smooth execution.

I'm trying to think of an example .... Keith Jarrett's passagework in some of the solo concerts is probably a good one. The object there is not the classical ideal of arhythmic, glassy smoothness, but rather the production of exciting waves of irregularly spaced accents within groups of rapid notes, which lends terrific rhythmic power to the music.

It is neither a better nor a worse way of doing things because the musical ends are very different. So in short, for this sort of music, I think actual fingering of a group is less important than its resulting musical effect. Much of what you play will probably not necessarily be a simple scale subset anyway. Therefore, invent your own five finger groups and work them over in as many different striking and accent sequences as possible, mentally absorbing their musical effect.  

Getting the tabla/sitar effect going fluently is far more difficult, or so I have found.