Aaron Weinstein Transcription - Pennies From Heaven

[Terry Pender]

Hello,

I've been studying jazz mandolin with Aaron for a little over a year.
During the course of our lessons we worked on a chord melody for Pennies From Heaven. As we worked on this piece I began transcribing the chord melody solo from his YouTube video - mostly as notes for myself and eventually I transcribed the entire solo.

There have been a lot of requests for transcriptions of Aaron's playing so I spoke with Aaron about posting this for the Mandolin Cafe folks. He thought it would be fine. To be clear - this is my transcription. Aaron is not endorsing it and has not checked the transcription for accuracy, but he's seen me play through it a few times - so here it is.

The URL for the video of Aaron playing this version of Pennies From Heaven is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sq18...HZu6m4&index=1

A few suggestions:
1) Buy Aaron's Mel Bay Chord Melody System. Get familiar and comfortable with the new chord voicings you'll discover there.
2) Make sure you can play and understand what is going on in Etude #2. It is essential a study of Pennies From Heaven and is significantly easier to play than his YouTube version. So get that under your fingers first!
3) This is a very difficult piece - take it slowly, one verse at a time. I've been working on this for year now.

Terry Pender

[Bill McCall]

My left hand started to cry when it saw some of the stretches��

[DSDarr]

Good job Terry! and thanks! I have been working through Aaron's book as well, although very, very slowly. Extremely challenging material for me. I had not made the connection with Etude #2 in the book and "Pennies from Heaven". Very useful information actually. I had wondered what tunes (if any) the various Etudes were based on. Etude #5 is very clearly based on "Lady Be Good" but other than that one I had not made any definite connections. A couple of the others sounds like they are based on familiar standards too: maybe #1 and #7 if I remember correctly. Does anyone know? Aaron??

thanks, David

p.s. I also started Aaron's Peghead Nation class, which is great. Not quite as challenging as the book (fortunately) but plenty challenging nevertheless. Highly recommended!

[Terry Pender]

David,

I asked Aaron this very question in one of our first email exchanges. I believe he told me that just those two tunes - Pennies From Heaven and Lady Be Good had similar chord progressions. The rest were not based on other standards.

I had been working on The Sunny Side of The Street and was very excited when I started playing measures 9 to 16 of Etude #2 - C7 - F6 - D7 - G7 and realised it was the same as the bridge from Sunnyside of the Street and many other tunes. I eventually realized it was based on Pennies From Heaven. Those 8 measures are gold.

Terry