Ted Greene -- Chord Chemistry

Great book if you play guitar.

This is high-level chord construction by the famous Ted Greene, who is well known in guitar circles as the master of chord harmonization. Few people in history attained his level of guitar voicing knowledge. This book is really intense and some of the fingerings are very usable and well worth exploration. However, some are very difficult and impractical. You could say nearly impossibly. Overall, it’s a very good book to expand music theory and knowledge regarding chords and harmonization. It really depends on your desire to learn and your motivation. I did find a couple of errors on page 65 and 71. The chords on the bottom row should be CMaj7 not C7 on page 65. And on page 71 the Bb7 on the second line from the bottom should be a BbMaj7. I ran the chords through a reverse chord finder app just to make sure, but I humble myself to the guitar giants of history. There is forum.tedgreene.com to expand the discussion.

Great

I'll 2nd what a few others have mentioned: if you buy this book I would suggest you go to tedgreene.com and download the free "Trail Guide to Chord Chemistry" This isn't your regular chord dictionary style book, there are tons of those books and they can be found cheap at used book stores. This is Ted Greene's way of making sense of the guitar's fretboard and how chords work across it. It's a book that you can come back to time and time again as you progress along your journey of learning theory/harmony.I read a few reviews complaining about the book only covering the chords in A and E chords. I'd say you should know where the notes are across the whole fretboard and have a basic understanding of the major scale and how to build chords before moving onto this book. All the chords are moveable so it doesn't matter that the book shows positions for only A and E chords (if it showed how to use them to play all the chords it would just be too many pages of filler with repeated chord forms over and over again).A great book for anyone wanting to become more proficient at the guitar. It would take me a lifetime to learn all it has to offer. I would recommend the book "Chords & Progressions for Jazz & Popular Guitar" by Arnie Berle for anyone wanting a little more of a beginner intro to using maj/min 6th,7th, 9th chords in your songs.

Ted Greene made his living teaching guitar. His approach to the instrument was more like keyboard player might see it. The problem with that is the fretboard changes in shape as you move through the keys. Here he shows you how to relocate harmony to the guitar in a realistic approximation to how a keyboard player might see it. He goes through all keys, scale and step wise movements and all the while helping you become aware of the notes your choosing and the relationship to all other surrounding keys. A fantastic resource to all guitar instructors.

This is an excellent content-oriented guide to more chords than you ever thought even existed. Enjoyable reading too, if that's something that would appeal to you. This is definitely NOT an intro book ..... to get the most out of this publication, you should be an experienced guitarist who knows his/her way around the fret board and has decent fret-hand technique. It also helps if you have decent technique for flat picking, hybrid picking, and/or open hand fingering.

I got this after hearing Guthrie Govan recommend it to anyone who thinks they know enough chords, and he was not wrong: This book is full of different chords and shapes for those chords all across the guitar neck.Admittedly, some of the shapes do not agree with my hands as they require a significant amount of flexibility, e.g. reverse-bending at the first knuckle of the middle finger while keeping the other fingers flat, but it's still nice to see all of the options for fretting chords all across the guitar neck.

This book, in a word is deep. Chord Chemistry is not for the armchair guitarist. i would venture to say that you would need a pretty firm grasp of theory before delving into this book. i am a professional guitarist and a graduate of the Berklee College of Music so theory is no stranger to me. this book is worth "the price of admission" for the chord voicings alone. i particularly love the way the chord shapes are all hand written (check out pages 14 and 15 for a dizzying array of ways to play an A chord.) Greene's explanations are concise as he covers essential jazz guitar prerequisites such as triads, polychords, voice leading and chord substitutions. i would have liked a chapter on modal harmony but this book is so chock full of chords that i can hardly complain. Chord Chemistry was originally released in 1971 but it is in no way "dated" as the concepts within are timeless. i wish i bought this book 30 years ago when i first started thinking seriously about music.