If you love Darn That Dream by Jimmy Van Heusen, you may be looking for the Darn That Dream Lead Sheet. We’ll, we’ve shared it here for you to use, practice and learn so that you can understand what is going on in the song, and so that you can learn to and be able to perform it yourself!
Darn That Dream was written in 1939 and was ranking Nr. 1 on the charts in 1940 when Benny Goodman released his rendition of the song.
With that being said, as always we’ll be going a little bit in depth on what it is you could be doing to learn and practice the song to the level where you master it!
Let’s have a look!
How To Master “Darn That Dream Lead Sheet”.
First of all, let’s analyze the song chart.
It looks like a lot of chords are taken place. The melody seems fairly easy with a quarter note pulse and the key being in G Major.
Interestingly enough, the first chord is not a major 7 chord, but G6. A little fun fact, back in the day, jazz and bebop players actually played major 6 chords way more often than major 7th chords.
The major 7th chords is a fairly new concept considering it resembles thirds stacked on top of each other, however the voicings that a lot of people played were major 6th chords.
It has two repeats and then the same ending as the beginning.
Like we always say here at Minedit, one of the very first steps we recommend anyone takes is to fully memorize the melody. It’ll make it so that you actually know the song.
Following step is that you take a good look at the harmony. Try to find iconic visual cues to help you fully memorize it. You’ll need it when you get to the solo part of things.
Next, you practice the melody and soloing over the chords scale and arpeggio wise by simply taking it one step at a time, slowly.
Next you have to speed things up a lot! Faster than what the original song feels like.
At this point, all that is left is for you to take out everything you’ve learned and apply it to a real life situation. Jam with friends or at a jazz session. This will only make you a much better performer!