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How to Play Misty


In this video, I'm going to play through parts of one of my favorite jazz standards "Misty." Just going to show you a few ideas of what you can do and hopefully it helps you. This song starts if E flat major 7. I'll just play it for a minute and then show you what I'm doing. One of the things I was doing there, one of them, so this is going down the E flat major 7. Now we're going to do it 2, 5, 1 to A flat major 7. So we're going, now the melody notes on the 3rd of this B flat minor 7 which is the 2. Sometimes what I'd like to do, you can either just go straight from B flat minor 7, E flat 7 to A flat major 7. Another thing you could do is the tri-tone substitution B flat minor 7 going down chromatically. I think this is like an A7 with the 9, to the A flat major 7. Here's the chromatic example and here's the 2, 5 example. Coming that practice and sometimes I'll put both of them and so I'm like, here's the A, G flat, A that's that chromatic. I got E flat minor 7 to D flat 7. Now we're E flat again to the 6, 2. Now we're doing 3, 6, 2, 5. I do this chromatically as well. What was I doing here, this is kind of an interesting thing so this is making that B flat 7 which is the 5, it's going to take us back to the 1 making it altered. The way that I think of this is to have a B flat and on top of it you're basically doing an E minor 7 arpeggio. It really makes it, gives it that altered sound. It's kind of sounds weird when you do it by itself but if you do it in the context, do that again. G, G flat 7 F minor 7 and here comes that altered.

Anyway, I hope those are some good ideas for you. I use that 3, 6, 2, 5, 1 a lot with that altered chords especially with songs like that. Main concepts here is to remember those 2, 5, 1s, it can either go 2, 5, 1 or they can do the tri-tone substitution which is 2 and they go down chromatically to the 1. Sometimes I kind of do both so I'll do, some kind of squeeze that last sort of passing chord in there. It's got a really nice sound. Then of course make sure you'll learn it in other versions too, instead of just, anyway, hopefully that was helpful.


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