Andy Chase

I got a bee in my bonnet to come up with a 3-finger melodic style arrangement of Paul Desmond's Take Five this afternoon. Partly because it's a great tune, partly because I want to get comfortable with the melodic style, and partly because I want to get more famliar with the fretboard, which will be immensely helpful with number two.

The original arrangement is in the key of E?m, which does not map intuitively at all to the standard five-string banjo tuning of GDGBD; when your instrument is tuned to an open G chord, everything you play wants to gravitate to the key of G.

Using the Gravity Boy chord finder I was able to come up with some reasonably sane fingerings for the two chords used by the main part of the tune, E?m and B?m7:

E?m
------- (2rd Fret)
| * | |
-------
* | * *
-------
| | | |
-------

B?m7
------- (5th Fret)
| * * *
-------
| | | |
-------
* | | |
-------

If you don't play the 3rd string (B?) on the E?m chords, you can get away with just barreing the fourth fret.

I haven't tackled the bridge yet, but according to this page the chords are C?maj7, A?m7, B?m7, E?m7, A?m7, D?7,G?maj7,Gdim7, Fm7?5 and B?7?9. Should be interesting. I think I may need to finally bite the bullet and shell out for some musical notation/tab software.