Misty

I really like the version of Erroll Garner's classic jazz standard Misty that Victor Wooten plays on the medley track Some Day My Prince Will Come/Misty/A Night in Tunisia/Vix Blu. However, I couldn't find any transcriptions around so I spent some time with (i.e. learning) Sonic Visualiser and Lilypond and tried to come up with my own. Although, it's an arrangement for solo bass, it's full of harmonics and so has a pretty rich feel. Plus it's a lot of fun to play!


While it wasn't too hard to transcribe the pitches by ear, I had a much harder time notating the rhythm and found Sonic Visualiser to be an enormous help in determining onset times from which I could come up with a reasonable rhythmic transcription. Still, some of the barring might seem weird to those with more formal musical training than me. If you find mistakes or have suggestions, please drop me a line!


While you can check out the score and tablature below, a much better quality PDF is available here and a MIDI file with the note onset times aligned to the original audio is here (warning the MIDI rendition doesn't do the original justice). The notation is pretty standard, although two points probably merit a bit of explanation. First, notes in the score with diamond heads denote natural harmonics. In the tablature, these notes have their fingerings enclosed in angular brackets. Because the only harmonics in this piece are natural harmonics, they all occur at fret positions 3, 4, 5, 7, and 9. In the case of the 3rd fret, this should be interpreted as something closer to 3.2, which is where this harmonic actually exists, but I couldn't figure out how to get Lilypond to produce fractional fret positions. Second, hammer-ons are denoted with a slur in the tablature. So, if there is a slur between two adjacent notes in the tablature, this means that the second note should be played as a hammer-on.


Enjoy and, of course, any comments, suggestions, and criticisms are welcomed.


Misty Transcription