Take the crutch and run Let’s use the chart to decipher the chart. Let’s stay on Stella . As a reminder, Martin Taylor wrote a great book on playing jazz guitar. Part of this book has you working through arranging some great songs using CAGED to build the chords. I like this because building by systems works well for me, rote memorization does, too, but I really like systems and guidelines.
Anyway, I started reading the chart from The Real Book and remembered how much I hate the symbol notation, so I made up a table for you on how to interpret the symbols.
Now, with that in mind, let’s jump into it.
Here’s the lead sheet. And because life is difficult, here’s the lead sheet in PDF.
Real Book Stella By Starlight
44.6KB ∙ PDF file
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Anyway, this is quite a lot of chords indicated in that cypher and goofy font designed to look like handwriting. What in the ever living hell is this? Let’s look at what’s actually in the song.
Why is this helpful? Well, if we’re going to find the notes we want to play, chord by chord, we should know what the chords are and which notes are in them. I’ve organized this by root note, rather than order of appearance, because I think that that it’s a good idea to have tables organized in predictable ways, and ascending order of root note is a good one.
Now, here’s the next step. Mark up your lead sheet with the notes of each chord as they appear. We’re going to think like Martin Taylor does, with a virtual four voices on the guitar. The virtual soprano will be the melody line, the virtual bass will be, of course, the bass line. Depending on what where we decide to play these notes, inner voices will become easy and logical, and we will generate CAGED positions.
Go ahead, mark it up. I’ll see you next time.
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📎 Files and downloads are available in the original Substack post.