Announcing a new Chord Book "Contemporary Chord Voicings For The Guitar" by Tom Principato

An Encyclopedia of over 250 chords in 55 categories, many extended and unusual voicings like Minor7#5, Minor6Major 7, Major9b3, 6 types of Suspended chords including Major7sus, minor11b5, 11b9, 13b9 and 55 open string voicings--condensed to 3, 4 and 5 note voicings for easier playing.

A lot of extended and more complex voicings, especially ones played on keyboards, often contain 5, 6 or more notes as they are altered and extended. It’s a challenge to play many of these kinds of voicings on the guitar given the limitation of 5 fretting fingers, and the limitation of six strings. So, the challenge is to find simpler, smaller voicings that still contain the tonality of the larger chords. This sometimes even means using chords without a root note in them. What I concentrated on for this book was to collect many of these more extended and unusual chords in simpler 3, 4, and 5 note finger patterns for the guitar. These are all move-able form chords which can be played anywhere on the neck. This is a contrast to the open-string voicings which are one-of-a-kind voicings for a particular place on the guitar neck. For the move-able forms, I’ve noted in the diagram where the root is located, and that’s your frame of reference for playing in different keys.

See photos for Table of Contents and the vast assortment of chord types.

Introduction

Yes, it’s me and I’m back! Ever since I researched and authored a book about Open String guitar chord voicings, no doubt about it, I’m all about chords. This book is about what I think of as “contemporary” chord voicings. In the last couple of decades more complicated and extended chord forms have been appearing in Popular music by such artists as Donald Fagen, Eric Johnson, Larry Carlton, and Robben Ford among others. Chords that we are hearing more and more in popular music like minor#5, and 11 and Sus chords which are creating new and contemporary sounds. 

Instead of just offering unnamed voicings with just an “R” to help name them in each category, I thought it would be better to offer examples that are in a few different keys. Some of the examples I chose had to do with how they sounded in a particular key, or a voicing with a wider reach of finger positions might be easier to play more around the “C” area of the neck as opposed to the bottom of the neck where the frets are wider apart such as “F” or “G” positions.

When researching chords by authorities like Ted Greene, I often felt overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of the presentation, and the realization that the variations can be an enormous amount and almost seem endless; where does one begin? Here I wanted to present a few chords for each category that I thought would really be usable, and not that difficult to play.

Tom Principato