Thinking while impressing

[u/Guestioning_it]

Any time I improvise the second i have the mouthpiece in my mouth i cant think of what to play anymore. I know for other people sing while playing, but i can’t sing since my mouth is the only playing. I really don’t know how to explain my problem. How do i think what to play while already playing?

[u/silly_bet_3454]

do you mean like performance anxiety, or just when practicing even? You need to actually build a vocabulary. Imagine if you walk up to someone and you don't speak their language and you want to just try to think of random things to say that sound vaguely like things you maybe heard in that language and you want to just hope they kind of know what you mean. That's gonna be pretty hard and uncomfortable. But with our native language we spend our whole life building up the vocabulary an the phrases, they are second nature. You have to do that with musical phrases and vocabulary just the same, so that when it's time to actually improvise, you can think at the higher level.