If you’re looking for the Stella By Starlight Lead Sheet, look no further! This particular chart has been around forever in the jazz community. It’s been created by Victor Young.
Stella by Starlight is a jazz standard that has been in the jazz community for a long time.
To this day, it is most likely the most often played jazz standard that I have ever played.
Everywhere I go, I have played it in small bands, big bands, jazz sessions and jam sessions.
To be quite honest, it is a super fun jazz standard to play and we’re going to go over everything there is to know about the Stella By Starlight Lead Sheet, so that we can prepare ourselves best to play and perform this song live within every setting.
How To Learn And Practice The Stella By Starlight Lead Sheet?
There is a very particular way you can go about when it comes to practicing this lead sheet and song.
First of all, we’re going to go over everything that is really important to know on how to approach the Stella By Starlight Lead Sheet.
1. Learn Thy Melody
It is so important to learn the melody of every song. It truly is! No matter what instrument you play, whenever you know the melody, you know half of the song.
Knowing the melody can really help you keep track of where you are in the song, and it can help create beautiful moments where you are able to play with the lead instrumentalist (if you are not the lead player) in unison the melody line.
Myself having known most melodies of jazz standards, I was always complimented for knowing the melody, because truth be told, not a lot of players do.
2. Know Thy Harmony.
Harmony and chords are so important! Well, first of all you have to know and memorize those chords because it allows you to actually accompany anyone who is playing the lead melody of the song.
Obviously, you really really have to know the harmony if you are a chordal instrument such as a guitar player or piano player, and even bass player.
With that being said, even singular linear instruments should know the harmony really well. First of all because you need to know the harmony to make sure you can play the correct scales and arpeggios on it, but second of all you also need to know what the chords are in order to know your arpeggios.
The arpeggios and scales will help connect the chords and harmony through out the song and will help you to establish a really peaceful and theoretically correct solo.
Once you have the baseline and foundation laid down for playing solos, then you can next start to play around with adding really cool playing patterns that you would build with all of the sales and arpeggios combined.
Also, do not forget that before you start approaching soloing and trying to make sense of all of the harmonically things that are going on in the Stella By Starlight Lead Sheet or in jazz standards in general, you really have to make sure you’ve memorized the harmony, scales in all keys and arpeggios in all keys.
What we finally recommend is that when you get to practicing soloing over this jazz standard, that you look at the harmony and figure out all of the options you have. Obviously, a chord is a chord, and so the harmony and arpeggios will be straight forward, but sometimes you have multiple options to play certain scales.
In this particular case, the Stella By Starlight Lead Sheet gives us the perfect opportunity to play around with scales from the diatonic system of major, harmonic minor and melodic minor.
We recommend that you write out all fo the three diatonic systems in the key of the song and try to figure out what chords overlap with the chords of the song and what scales you particularly have access to.
For a fact, we know that we always have access to the altered scale, which is the seventh degree of melodic minor.
However, depending on the dominant chords, that scale changes constantly.
The same may be the case for lets say minor 7 b5 chords. Figure out what scales and diatonic systems you have access to in the song and what scales you can play over the chords, and you might be surprised with how many cool sounds you can make over the harmony.
Try it out in jam sessions with friends or at bars, or small bands at school
Last But Not Least
We are always looking to connect more with professional musicians, and learn more about how other musicians approach certain songs in the real of music and especially jazz music for that matter.
Int he end, we really would like to hear from a lot of you out there who professionally play jazz or other type of music in a professional setting.
You are more then welcome to comment in the comment section down below and share your story as a professional musician.
What songs do you play most often? What style and in what particular setting? Is there a song that you hate to play or love to play? And why? Do you consider this Stella By Starlight Lead Sheet to be an easy song or not? If so, why?
All of these answers would really help us and inspire a younger audience and jazz players.
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