There are two things you want to notice here:Īs I said, just playing a chord on the heavy beats sounds great, and Shell-voicings are very useful because most of the time you can easily add a shell-voicing under a melody note or even just use the shell-voicing as I do here on Bbm7 and Abmaj7.Īnd that is lucky because the next part has an even more busy melody with the arpeggio as a pickup. That is clear already in the next phrase: This makes Misty a lot easier since the melody moves around really a lot but only adding a chord in the important spots makes it a lot simpler.
The other advice that I give is to only add chords on beats 1 and 3 in the beginning, just to make it easier to play and also to make the harmony clear when the chords change. As you can see then already the next phrase has a Bb which is of course not possible to play on the B string and there are quite a few notes in the melody that are lower than B. It works great with the Ebmaj7 chord, and later in the video, I will show you some nice suspensions you can add here on that long note, because there are a lot of beautiful options. The reason for saying this is of course that if you can play the melody there then it is a lot easier to find chords to put under it.įor the first phrase you have a pick-up and a long note: Misty doesn’t really follow one of two the things that I usually tell students to do when making their own chord melody arrangement, which is: Play the melody on the two top strings.
#JAZZ GUITAR CHORD MELODY TRANSCRIPTIONS PDF HOW TO#
I could read music well enough to figure out how to play the melody,Īnd I was aware that I needed to transpose the melody up an octave which also makes it easier to put a chord under it. I was of course lucky, that there were two things I already had going for me: And this really made some things click for me.Īt the time, I had heard people play chord melodies, especially Scofield and Wes Montgomery, but I hadn’t thought about doing that myself, then I realized that it could be fun to try and do that with this song which I had already played the chords of many times though I didn’t know it by heart. My favorite maj7 voicing at the time was the basic root position maj7 (Cut in – Incredibly Hip and Advanced, I know….) and when I played through the chords then I realized that the melody was the top-note of that chord in the first bar. I was bored with the arpeggios and scales, so I started flipping through the real book looking at the songs when I saw Misty in there, so I decided to play that. A few months earlier, I had bought a real book which at the time was an incredible source of information since this was before the internet and online resources, it was all books and cds, and I hardly had any when it came to Jazz, in fact, the only thing I had was the real book and 5 or 6 jazz cds, which were mostly Scofield and a little Charlie Parker.ĭuring my stay, when we played, a friend of mine always wanted to play Misty, because he had a Dexter Gordon version of that song that he really liked. It was in June and I was sitting outside in the sun practicing, something that I am sure that you can tell that I don’t do often. I wasn’t very far in learning, but having the time to practice and play with others for that long was of course incredibly useful, and it was a part of what I used to prepare for getting into a school to get a degree in Jazz performance, which I did in The Hague a few years later I had spent 8 months practicing and trying to learn Jazz after getting my bachelors degree in Mathematics at the university. I was finishing a stay at a folk high school, which is really a Danish thing, a type of boarding school for adult education. I sort of stumbled my way into chord melody, and weirdly enough the first song I ever made a chord melody arrangement of was actually a song that I don’t really like, and when I made it I had never heard of Barney Kessel and Joe Pass who later became my main inspirations for this. You want to explore all the amazing colors and embellishments that you can add to the music. I think that the most beautiful way to work with Jazz harmony is to work on chord melody, the type of playing you hear from Barney Kessel and Joe Pass where the melody is used as a foundation that you can add amazing chords to, but you do need to work on it the right way to really get all the benefits, You don’t want to just play something from paper trying to make your way from chord diagram to chord diagram.
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