Isn't She Lovely (Stevie Wonder)

If you asked people randomly in the street to name one song with harmonica, bets are that more often than not they would cite Stevie Wonder's Isn't She Lovely. Sure, it's an old chestnut, poppy and romantic as all hell, but Stevie can make even the smoochiest things sound cool.

The various stats tool that I use for this blog allow me to see which search engine queries point to Harmonica Ramblings, and one query that comes up again and again and again in all kinds of search engines is "Isn't She Lovely" +tabs. Search engines being what they are, the queries point here because there are tabs and because Isn't She Lovely was featured on The Groove Show, but so far, there were no tabs for it to be found here. So, for the first time, I'm going to reverse the way this blog works and provide new potential readers with what they apparently want and don't find on the site.

Here are the tabs to Stevie Wonder's Isn't She Lovely, from his masterpiece Songs in the Key of Life. I'm not a chromatic expert, but what Stevie is playing is mostly the melody (although he plays around it a lot, but you'll have to figure that out for yourselves) and fairly simple. I make the song key an E (at least the version featured on my podcast). Since I don't own a proper font for chromatic harmonica, I built a quick and (hopefully) intuitive tabbing system with excel that shouldn't need any explanation. Enjoy!

Isn't She Lovely (C Chromatic)

A few words of advice on playing this "the stevie way". First of all, Stevie is fond of attacking the first note of the main theme by jabbing it. What this means is that when he starts blowing air, the slide isn't in yet and as he starts blowing, he slides it in. This is what creates this peculiar attack.

Another thing is that Stevie loves his ornementations, so for example on the second line when he goes Ab A B A he's likely to give the slide a quick push to make the phrase effectively Ab A B-C-B A.

Anyway, try it out, and if you're an expert on Stevie's style, please leave comments for the hopefuls and beginners like me!

Important note: It was pointed out to me that I have tabbed this on a barytone or 16-hole chromatic (which is what I normally use) and not on  a normal 12-hole chromatic. I'll correct this when time allows, but in the meantime, you can easily do it yourself by shifting everything four holes down and starting on whole 7.

Comments

[park]

thank you

[정소희]

안녕하세요 ^_^
Isn't She Lovely 하모니카 악보 부탁 드립니다

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I want a chromatic hamornica music of isn't she lovely by Stevie Wonder.

Could you send me a chromatic hamornica music of isn't she lovely?