Ted Greene, 1977
Transcribed by Anders Hagstrom
Satin_Doll_TedGreene.Transcription.pdf

Hi!

This is my transcription of Ted Greene playing Satin Doll during a private lesson that Nick Stasinos had with him back in 1977. The recording can be found in the Audio section of this website. I strongly suggest that you listen to it when you’re learning this piece.

I transcribed all the bass lines, etc., but didn’t notate slides and ghost notes. You should experiment with that yourself.

This arrangement can be tricky to play. The hardest part is to make everything flow with a swinging groove. But there’s no wild stretches or difficult chords (compared to other arrangement that Ted wrote), so it’s definitely doable.

Learn a few bars at a time and practice very, very slowly. Use a metronome on two and four, and work up to speed.

Also, Ted’s guitar is tuned down a half step to Eb, so tune down your guitar if you want to play along with him.

Some suggestions:

Measure 6: Play the Abm9 with a 1st finger barre, and make a quick slide on the high E string with your 3rd finger up to Bb. Same thing in measure 30.

Measure 23: Very cool turnaround! Slide into the C and G triad, and make sure you keep the open D string ringing.

Measure 35: I added left hand fingerings for the “TAG,” but feel free to experiment.

And don´t forget to add some open string "ghost notes" wherever possible!

Enjoy!

Anders