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Hari – also, there are recordings of other students playing “Misty” on the web site. (See “Students play”)
That will give you a sense how everyone puts a little different spin on the song – sometimes intentionally sometimes not.It might help you to review the “Reading the dot songs” lesson again.
As for the notation:
The “fraction” on the left of each keyboard diagram is the scale designation of the pictured notes. It’s not useful to you at this point but may be once you get to voicing songs yourself (the last part of the seminar).On the right side, going from top to bottom are the melody notes. The parentheses () represent when the entire chord is struck – it will typically be the highest note on the diagram. The notes below that are “passing notes” that lead to the next chord. So you’ll “let go” of the top note to play the ones leading to the next chord (often your fingers are already on some or all of those notes – you’ll just have to see what fingering feels most comfortable to you.
Chord 4 (the Bbm7 chord) is the one that’s a little tricky – it’s a scenario you may see once in a while in other songs. You’ll notice the parentheses are around the second note (C). The melody note that chord starts on is D. (The chord numbers under the melody line at the top of the page may be a little off if you printed the page).
So for measure 4 you first play the Bb with your left pinkie and the Db with your right thumb – then on next beat play then entire chord (your right pinkie will be on the C melody. Your hand will be in position to play the entire chord – you’ll just only play the Bb and D first.
Hope this makes some sense – if not, just keep asking questions.
I think perhaps those of us who have learned “Misty” forget how long it really took and how many times we played it. All I can say is that it gets easier – but learning to voice on your own also takes a while (but is a HUGE benefit going forward.) Which reminds me of another important insight: some songs will be easier to voice than others. I don’t know exactly why but the point is if you get stuck you can always try a different song.
But back to your question about listening to “Misty”. The are some student recordings of “Misty” in the “Student play” page. (And lots of renditions on-line) If your fingers match the dot song drawings you’re playing the song as Suds intended. Playing it “correctly” is a different question. I’d strongly urge you to play the chords as David intended – unless you have some physical reason that gets in the way. But, as the student recordings demonstrate, you do have choices on how you’d like it to sound.
The one thing I always liked about the Method is, as you continue to learn, you can make you own choices about how you want any particular song to sound. Even “Misty”.
Most importantly, have fun. And feel free to try stuff. We all learn a little differently.
Mark – I stumbled on this post which never was responded to. You can find more of Sud’s thoughts about voicing in the Basic Resources section within “when you start to voice on your own.” (See his “voicing analysis examples” in particular).
There’s tons of theoretical stuff published on chords and harmonies. My bias is that it’s not much help to amateurs (that’s me) except perhaps to explain some things after the fact.
I think learning David’s “rules”, using them a lot (play a lot of songs) then start experimenting with sounds is a relatively modest task but can give you some creative space. If you’re curious (and persistent) you can usually discover how to describe the chord but I’m not sure how much it matters.
Suds has other info in the “Advanced resources” on polychords and stride – maybe some whole tone scale stuff – I don’t remember.
Hi Gary – I enjoyed your rendition of “September Song”. As you may know, Kurt Weill, who wrote the song, has an interesting back story. He composed a number of orchestral works and collaborated with Bertolt Brecht on several stage productions. He believed in writing songs that had a socially useful purpose.
He fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and ended up in New York where the Broadway debut of his musical “Three Penny Opera” opened to mixed reviews – although a song from the musical found its way into the jazz lexicon: “Mack the Knife”. He became more immersed in American popular music and among the songs I know of his is an interesting collaboration with Ogden Nash titled “Speak Low” – Nash’s one and only foray into writing song lyrics.
Angelo – if you’re still mashing about with “play” and “practice”, I have some other thoughts that I’m hoping to share in a newsletter that I’ve been putting off for way too long.
Hi Angelo,
I’d say three things:
1. There’s no formula that fits all for what you want to do with your practice time. Experiment, find out what works for you – or works for you now.
2. I “read” fake books to get a little refreshed and see if there are other tunes I want to spend some time with. I also use fake books to refresh my memory of songs I used to play a lot.
3. I don’t “know” tunes as well as I think I do – you probably don’t either. You have to play tunes a lot and make and correct a lot of errors to get them deeply into your hands. It’s a lesson I’m still learning. I’ve picked up “Misty” again after not really playing it for a couple decades. I’m learning that I just got bored with it, I didn’t really learn it. Now I’m spending more time thinking about how the song feels to me and how else I might want it to feel.
You might also find William Westney’s book “The Perfect Wrong Note” inspirational and helpful.
Elwoods,
Yup. Been there (and still visit regularly). It really is mainly about lots of repetitions – your hands are learning, it’s just hard to tell for a while. Most of us aren’t obsessive enough to flatten out the learning curve much.Believe it or not, I have returned to ‘Misty’ after pretty much ignoring it for over a decade.
Two reasons: It just seemed odd for me, as the ersatz leader of this little endeavor, to not have Misty well in hand at all times. And two, having sorta recently finished Sudnow’s second version of “Ways of the Hand”, I was struck by two things he said about singing (or scatting) along with your playing and physically moving and swaying in a way that expressed the mood of your playing. Misty just seemed like the proper vehicle for this bit of investigation.
Elwood, if you’ll pardon me for slipping into a more pedagogical mode, I’d strongly encourage you to work through your lead sheets figuring out full voicings. It’s tedious but it’s a shorter distance to where you want to go.
Hi Elwood, welcome back.
I haven’t gotten around to writing my review of Suds’ revised edition of “Ways of the Hand” but I”ll pass along another resource that fills in some gaps for me regarding the old “don’t make mistakes” mantra. That never quite seemed like the whole story of how we learn things and William Westley’s book “The Perfect Wrong Note” provides a crucial counterpoint.
In the past I’ve often recommended that people specifically allocate practice time to just “goofing around”. It seems to me now that what I was encouraging was a suspension of the “don’t make mistakes” mindset.
Westley’s book is a more rigorous defense, even encouragement, of what he calls “honest mistakes”.
It’s well worth a read.
Hi Elwood, welcome back.
I haven’t gotten around to writing my review of Suds’ revised edition of “Ways of the Hand” but I”ll pass along another resource that fills in some gaps for me regarding the old “don’t make mistakes” mantra. That never quite seemed like the whole story of how we learn things and William Westley’s book “The Perfect Wrong Note” provides a crucial counterpoint.
In the past I’ve often recommended that people specifically allocate practice time to just “goofing around”. It seems to me now that what I was encouraging was a suspension of the “don’t make mistakes” mindset.
Westley’s book is a more rigorous defense, even encouragement, of what he calls “honest mistakes”.
It’s well worth a read.
I just meant that it’s not technically demanding. Given some time your hands will learn the shapes and your ears will learn the sounds.
Still, as you note, it’s not “easy” in the sense that you’ll get it right away. If it takes you a “few weeks” you’ll be well ahead of most people.
That being said, I got so sick of playing it that I literally quit playing Misty for a couple decades. Recently I picked it up again and am now learning new ways to play the tune.
In any case, it’s not a contest. Enjoy the journey and trust yourself to figure things out in a way that makes sense to you. The Method is a guideline not a rigid set of rules.
Hi Jaime,
You mentioned that you have some classical training. That will help you in some ways but hinder you in others.
Here is my view:
There is nothing particularly demanding about learning Misty in this manner – it’s just a matter of attentive repetition.
The scale question involves a little different perspective than you may be accustomed to. David proscribes two practice approaches: one using typical fingering and one using one finger. The goal of the first approach is just to get used to the thumb-under movement (you probably already are) and the goal of the second approach is to visually internalize the scale paths to the point where if someone says what’s the 3rd (or 5th,7th,9th, etc) of a Bb major scale, you’ll immediately see D. The paths and scale degrees are visually implanted in your brain.
The “Learning to voice” section didn’t used to be separated from the Misty part – I made that change because people were getting hung up on voicing before they could play Misty and it just became a distraction.
There’s no particular reason you can’t view that part of the seminar. ‘Misty’ is already voiced for you.
Keep in mind that this is a different way of thinking about song-playing than most classical trained musicians are used to.
Thanks for reaching out.
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