Kicking off Journeying on with a Roman map. Martin Taylor’s challenge is not as hard as I’m making it. All he wanted us to do was play some shapes we wouldn’t otherwise use, being conscious of their relationships to The CAGED System . Because I am a moron, I picked the hardest song on the list to go first, Stella. This got a little intense, so I tagged in some help from Trevor .
Have you ever seen how some Asian people get on a bike and get it going? They’ll put one on a pedal, hold the bars and push the ground with the other foot. It’s a useful way to build up speed so that when you get on the bike, you’re not going to fall over, and you don’t have to worry about balancing while you try to get going.
I used to call it “kicking off” when I would visit my family in India. I don’t know what it’s properly called, but Trevor helped me kick off this Stella problem.
First things, first. Here’s Ron Carter playing Stella. It’s unbearable how rich his hands are.
And, yes, it’s that Ron Carter.
Anyway, the kickoff. This was really hard for me. Stella’s not a song I’ve really played much before, so it’s not like I had a lot of familiarity with it. I couldn’t just think, “Oh, hey, I’ll just sub in this voicing for what I normally use.” I had to learn a really hard song while using an unfamiliar system to build the chords. And this got to be a big task.
So I asked him for some help, how to kick this off. And he gave me a clue, which is a map on where to build the chords.
The Roman numerals tell you where the index finger is on the neck. II is the second fret, second position. V is the fifth fret, fifth position. You see how this works. By telling me where I could voice the chords, Trevor reduced the number of choices available to me, preventing paralysis. Now, I had to look for how to voice the chords where he told me to do it.
This made it so much easier. By seeing where my index finger went, I could look at the notes of the chord and locate the possibilities that would keep my first finger in that position.
This took me a lot of work. I wasn’t able to easily deduce the shapes based on the system, and I had a lot of trouble with the C and G shapes. These are not shapes that I really prefer. Using this system flushed that out. I found out that I really like using the A, E and D shapes, like most people. This is a problem because if I don’t make use of the C and G shapes, I’m dropping off about half the possibilities of the fifth and sixth strings, missing the low end .
Now, I got into a little trouble trying to use MuseScore for this, because I am still not great with it, but I put in my answers. Check it out.
Stella By Starlight With Chord Charts Dheeraj Answers
58.4KB ∙ PDF file
Download Download Let’s be clear, the kickoff from Trevor was invaluable, but I really learnt quite a lot in this struggle. Having to think about each voicing in terms of what mother shape it came from was really, really hard, and I had to really think about which notes were available at which position. Of course, that your first finger is there doesn’t mean that it’s the upper or lower boundary of the chord, just that that’s where your first finger is. You can find chords, particularly, the C shape variety, in which the position is a barre that is a good two frets away from everything else. What I really like about this is that Trevor’s map forced me to take inversions seriously. I didn’t just play everything in root voicing, which is my normal temptation.
It’s probable that I entered some of these diagrams incorrectly. Unlike Guitar Pro, MuseScore doesn’t tell you the string names when you are entering chord diagrams, and I could have miscounted.
So, one more thing. This is an insane song. The melody lingers, the chords are weird, etc. So I decided to add one more step, which is that before getting to chord melody, thinking about bass and soprano, and so forth, I wanted to just strum the chords and try to sing it. I could have probably reduced this, but I didn’t.
These voicing are probably well suited for adding the melody notes, but I haven’t really tried, yet. I’m just strumming and singing, and those C shapes are hard to play without muting.
Give this a shot, see what you find.
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📎 Files and downloads are available in the original Substack post.