If you are old enough to really know the Dire Straits classic “Sultans of Swing” you might know what that headline refers to. For the rest of y’all, it’s often the line I use when I am admitting that I am a way better rhythm guitar player than I am a lead guitar player.
Check out Guitar George
He knows all the chords
But he’s strictly rhythm
He doesn’t want to make it cry or sing
Being an at-best mediocre lead player used to really bother me but I have come to terms with it over the past 10 years or so. Because I may be “just” a rhythm player but I am a damn good rhythm player. I have had this conversation a lot lately as my musical pursuits have taken a strong turn towards songwriting and, even more recently towards my long-simmering love of Bossa Nova. There is an actual band in the works. But more on that some other time.
The bossa thing comes into play because it is—when done right—guitar-forward music with really rich and varied chord structures. And when I first started to learn it I found that, unlike the aforementioned George who “knows all the chords” that I had poop to learn. I had never played things like 13 chords with a flat 9 or major 7s with a flat 5 until the past few months.
It’s probably the “fact” that our Big Tech overlords have ways to listen in on everything we do or say or even think, but as I delved ever-deeper into the bossa world, I noted a seeming increase in the number of online ads i was seeing that all promised to “unlock” the fretboard without little annoyances like actually getting some kind of foundation in music theory. Everyone seems to have a secret system that you can have for the low low price of just… Whatever the price was.
And that, in turn, reminded me of the single lesson I took that actually did give me at least the tools to unlock the instrument and I’ll share it for free.
In the mid 1980s, I lucked out and someone—I have zero recollection who—gave me a phone number for Ted Greene and told me he was actually taking private students. If you don’t know who Ted was, there is a Wikipedia page but, beyond noting that guitar heroes including Steve Via and John McLoughlin used words like “unbelievable” to describe the way Ted approached fretboard harmony, it really doesn’t tell ya much.
My first exposure to Ted was when I was a young teenager just trying to make heads or tails of the guitar and my teacher had a well-worn copy of a book that he had self-published full of hand-written musical examples and with text that had obviously come off of an old typewriter. It was called Chord Chemistry Ted used to refer to it as “Chord Catastrophe.” I still have a copy, but it is, unfortunately, not the old one which I probably lent to someone who never gave it back. The one I have now is done by Alfred Publishing and has a terrible generic cover. The old one (Pictured at the top of this missive) was tan with a black-and-white photo of Ted sporting some truly epic sideburns. I do still have my original copy of his tome called Single Note Jazz Guitar Soloing, Volume 1. Had I paid more attention to that one, maybe I would not still be a mediocre lead player.
So back to my lesson story.
I called Ted and told him I was interested in taking some lessons. He replied by telling me there was a six-month waiting list and, thank all that is holy, I opted to have him add my name to the list. If I remember right (never a sure thing these days) it was more like 8 months but he did eventually call me so set up a lesson. That first lesson took place at his parent’s house in Woodland Hills very close to Pierce College where I was studying (I use that term loosely) journalism.
I sat down holding my 335 and Ted had his ever-present Tele and he asked me what I was hoping to learn.
This is probably a good time to note that the mid’80s were the last time up until just two or three years ago that I had the temerity to try writing songs. So I told Ted that I was trying my hand at writing and felt like getting a better handle on chord substitution might be helpful.
Ted used to have this tall filing cabinet full of hand-written and photocopied lesson sheets. I still have that sheet and will include it at the end of this. Ted died almost 20 years ago so I’m not cutting into his potential universe of students.
Actually, he pulled out four or five sheets. I should probably admit at this point that I am a terrible student and I only took lessons from Ted about every six months because one lesson was like drinking out of a firehose.
Anyway, the two “unlock” sheets consisted of a sheet outlining A major triads in more than 50 positions on the fingerboard. That is not a typo. (Before someone gets their panties in a bunch and writes to tell me more than 50 is impossible, note that this includes both closed and open triads. A closed triad is what most of us think about when we think of a triad. All of the notes are close to one another and the root, third and fifth all exist within a single octave. An open triad is the opposite. The three degrees of the triad are played across multiple octaves.)
Yes, some of the open voicings are not really playable by mere mortals. But that sheet, along with one called Chord Construction Formulas and Symbols totally did the trick.
You see, having so many ways to play an A major triad meant, via changing the root note and altering or extending the triad, I could at least theoretically play *any* chord in 50+ positions on the fretboard. And the “how-to” of that was outlined in a second sheet called Chord Construction Formulas and Symbols..
But, no, it is not a secret and it is not a way to unlock the instrument in a weekend without ever learning any theory. Those do not really exist outside the realm of YouTube charlatans. Actually this kind of exercise which Ted referred to as “chord streams” or “inversion rows” have been practiced by piano players for hundreds of years. But us guitar players who cut our teeth playing rock music largely—myself included— learned somewhere between two and five closed triads and then called it a day.
This approach is simple but not easy. But if you take the time to really absorb it, the info on those sheets could be life-changing. But no one ever got rich by really explaining things in depth. But lots of people have made lots of money by promising people a way to skip over all of the hard work. Thank all that is holy that Ted was *not* one of those guys.