Modern Chord Progressions [Paperback]

Ted Greene (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 22, 1985

A collection and explanation of many different types of important progressions for the intermediate and advanced guitarist.

Product Details

• Paperback: 107 pages
• Publisher: Alfred Pub Co (March 22, 1985)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0898986982
• ISBN-13: 978-0898986983
• Product Dimensions: 11.9 x 8.9 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #79,760 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

60 of 61 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must have for the aspiring Jazz guitarist!, January 8, 2000

By 

Coffee Lover (Carnation, WA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Modern Chord Progressions (Paperback)

Ted Greene is one of those rare individuals who has made it his life's work to teach harmony on the guitar. In this book, Ted takes you down the road to a greater understanding of how chords can be strung together to create harmonized musical phrases. The book is not for the beginner or for the faint of heart. It is best digested slowly - say a page at a time. The best favor you can do for yourself is to attack every chord and every phrase analytically. Play every harmonic phrase slowly and cleanly until you can do it perfectly. Take apart each chord and make sure you know what the harmonic function of each note in the chord is. By that I mean mentally (or physically) label every note on each string in the chord with it's corresponding scale degree - R 3 5 b7, etc. If a chord is named F7b9#5 figure out why. It took me over a year to work my way through the book. It can be done! Now go practice.

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The perfect complement to "Chord Chemistry", February 13, 2006

By 

John C. Holton (Marietta, GA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Modern Chord Progressions (Paperback)

Ted Greene continues the lessons taught in Chord Chemistry, treating chord progressions in the same exhaustive manner. He takes a progression (say, I-vi-ii-V7) and demonstrates a large number of chord combinations, many of which lend themselves to creating melodic lines. At first look, it appears to be nothing more than page after page of four-chord groupings, but as you work through this book (and it will take you some time), you realize that you're not just playing chords, you're making music, and before you know it, you find yourself escaping Ted's world and finding your own way around the fingerboard. This book, like its companion, is not particularly well laid-out; the chord diagrams are drawn in, and the text, though typeset rather than typed, still contains a few handwritten notes, but again, it was a product of its time (the early 1970's) and Ted can be a very funny person. Toward the end of the book, he has a handwritten note that says, "If you haven't cussed me out by now, you will after you try these." Don't expect to get through this book in a couple of weeks, but it will become as much a fixture in your library as Chord Chemistry.

22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A wealth of beautiful Voice-Leading Progressions from the master of guitar harmony, January 30, 2006

By 

Dan Page (San Diego, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Modern Chord Progressions (Paperback)

This book is awesome... But it's only really useful in terms of serious long-term study. I'm an intermediate level guitarist, and it took me very long just to get the first couple of progressions on the first page mastered. Mr. Greene does not shy away from using difficult or akward voicings in his progressions..., but they are so well thought out in terms of the progressions that any easier voicings would totally ruin the nature of the progression. The voice leading is simply beautiful, and ted greene has a very nice, compact, visual way of displaying the progressions so that they take up very little space. Melody is emphasized in the progressions. Overall, they do not sound like something you would use as comping patterns, but more like something you would use if you were composing (spontaneously or written out) beautiful guitar music of the highest order.

No rhythms are provided in the book... it is all just chord diagrams one after the other.

I also need to emphasize the vast number of progressions that are in this book. It is truly a lot of bang for your buck, and i cannot imagine anyone ever being able to internalize all of these unless they spend a few years devoted to practicing these voice leading exercises.

This book stands head and shoulders above a lot of the music books today, because it has so much information in every page, and so much music in every progression. A typical hal leonard book presentation (with standard notation, and tablature written out) would allow about 1 fifth of the information in here into a book of 100 or so pages. I like these old-school style books, with just chord diagrams or just standard notation with fingerings. We should all be learning how to read. Man I hate tab..., space-consuming garbage IMO now.