Tony Bennett’s 1962 recording of “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” was a double whammy. It made him famous. It made the song famous. He sang it in the key of C major. But it’s not a three chord song by any means. How do you reduce it to something manageable yet retain the harmonic color? Enroute to producing a one-page song sheet, I made a play along video with lyrics and chord names against my piano video.
Many Chords for Harmonic Color
To play the ukulele to my 2016 solo piano recording, I consulted lead sheets and transcriptions, experimented with substitute and simplified chords, played by ear, and made a one-page song sheet with 27 chords (shown left).
Listen to how Tony Bennett sang it. Use straight down strums and occasional shuffle (down and up). I used a faster tempo in the beginning but modulated up a half step for the repeat in my video.
Repeated Chord Sequences
Many of these “exotic” chords are used briefly in so-called walk-ups or walk-downs and runs. Here is an example of the three chords (D minor, A augmented and F) in a passage.
Ukulele Chord Named by Notes
Major and minor chords require only three different notes to define them. As the ukulele has four strings, one of the notes is either repeated (doubled) or an octave higher or lower.
7th chords (such as dominant 7th, major 7th, and minor 7th chords) require four different notes to define them. Beyond 7th chords (such as 9th etc), a decision has to be made about which notes to skip on the four string instrument.
Similar to major and minor chords, augmented chords require only three different notes to define them. However they have an additional property that when inverted, the distance between consective pairs of notes retains a major 3rd interval. What this means is that each augmented chord can have three different names, corresponding to the notes they contain.
Each chord will have additional names if the names of the notes have other names. This is called “enharmonic” — different names for the same pitch.
The abbreviation for augmented is aug or the plus sign. Example: C+ is made up of the notes C, E and G#. E+chord has the notes E, G# and C. G# aug has the notes of G#, C and E. Another name for G# is Ab. Ab aug chord has the notes Ab, C, and E.
On the other hand, a diminished 7th chord because of the 7th require four (not three) different notes to define. Similar to augmented chords, however, a dim7 chord is named by the notes it contains. When inverted, the consecutively pitched pairs of notes retain the minor third interval. As there are 12 different notes in a chromatic scale, there are three sets of 4-note diminished 7 chords. The abbreviation for diminished is dim. The symbol is a (temperature) degree.
Dear Reader, after all this you may be asking “where is the song sheet?” or “where is the play along video?”
Join us in 3 Chord Thursday Golden Oldies on 3rd August 2023 at 3 pm EDT (20:00 BST) to learn the chords and play/sing the song. Register for the Zoom link and access with a day pass or subscribe for a month or seasonal pass. The Zoom session lasts one hour, starting with a warm-up lesson.
I made one more change to the song sheet AFTER I produced the play along video. Use a “D7” chord instead of “D” in the final “San Francisco” below.
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