Bye Bye Blackbird melody as played by Miles Davis for guitar

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Bye Bye Blackbird

 Please click on the image to view and print: or click on

the link to download the Pdf version: Bye Bye Blackbird

   From now on, I've decided to learn every new jazz standard by ear and stay away from learning melodies straight from a fake book. Every couple of months, I'll post a featured jazz artist's solo or melody transcription and share what I've been working on.

Recently, I wanted to learn "Bye Bye Blackbird." I had been looking at the version in my fake book, but then I heard Miles Davis play it, and I immediately noticed how much more interesting and musical his version sounded. After learning the melody from the fake book, I realized that, to my ears, it sounded pretty lifeless and boring compared to the way Miles played it.

So I decided to lift the melody directly from the Miles Davis version. And, man, what a difference! The phrasing sounds so much better and more melodic. There are subtle things in the way Miles plays the melody that you just don't get from looking at the notes on a page. It's a good reminder that there's a lot more to a melody than simply playing the right notes.

I didn't have time to write everything out neatly on my computer using notation software and tabs, so for now, I'm posting my good old chicken-scratch handwriting on manuscript paper. The song is in the key of F major, and hopefully anyone who comes across this post can read music!

In the future, I'll come back and edit this post with cleaner notation and tabs to make it easier to follow.

Enjoy, and happy playing!, please visit my past blog post on how to get started in learning how to read music on guitar.

 The Guitar Trix & Tips Blog is associated with Guitar 6 School of Music