As I mentioned in my previous post , I’ve been working on using the CAGED system to build chord arrangements for a few songs as part of an exercise. One of them is the immortal Stella By Starlight.
And it turns out that I hate chord symbols. Reading the Real Book chart is irritating for me because it has the plus, minus, circle, etc. It’s fine, people use them. I can read it but it’s not my preferred system. Sometimes I get a little flustered by them.
So I made a crutch.
People use crutch as a bad word. I think that that’s insane. When you are learning to walk again after an injury, a crutch is critical. When you are permanently crippled, you need something to help you walk. Here’s what I mean by the symbols.
Anyway, look at that. Minus signs, plusses, whatever. And there’s no translation table, anywhere.
So I made this, a translation table of symbols from The Real Book to common names and spellings.
English Names”,”description”:””}” data-component-name=”DatawrapperToDOM”> !function(){“use strict”;window.addEventListener(“message”,(function(e){if(void 0!==e.data[“datawrapper-height”]){var t=document.querySelectorAll(“iframe”);for(var a in e.data[“datawrapper-height”])for(var r=0;rThis is exactly the sort of lookup table that I find very, very useful. Should I have it memorized? Yes. Do I? No. Thirty odd years later, I am capable of teaching Latin at a college level. Do I forget things, like the word for inkwell? Yup, often. Tables like this are useful crutches. They also help you with remembering things, the act of writing it out reinscribes (get it?) the concept in your mind.
Enjoy.
Next post, I’ll show you how to make use of these in preparing something.
(And there’s a PDF for you, too, if you need it, of the original lead sheet.)
Real Book Stella By Starlight
44.6KB ∙ PDF file
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📎 Files and downloads are available in the original Substack post.