ABSTRACT
The overall focus of this chapter is jazz guitar expertise, where chunking, schemas and templates are important concepts. These concepts explain essential psychological mechanisms that underpin the ability to improvise, including the ability to quickly recognize and generate patterns based on a profound knowledge of musical style. Chunking refers to basic coding, schemas to extended coding, and templates to altered coding. The inquiry explains how experts combine these strategies depending on context. The last part of the chapter deals with action-based chunking and describes how a body in action generates musical ideas that are very different from ideas in an abstract, de-situated setting. A section on the neurocognitive aspects of improvisation and possible negative aspects of schemas are discussed before the chapter ends with some reflections on the relationship between schemas, chunks and templates.
