Berklee Guitar Chords 101

Learn the Berklee approach to guitar chords. This book will help you develop fluency in basic fretboard harmonic knowledge, tone, time feel, facility, and endurance. You will learn to play, use, and understand guitar chords in a variety of styles and musical applications including blues, jazz, pop, and singer-songwriter styles. Develop a toolbox of chordal vocabulary including triads, four-part chords, and guide-tone voicings with tensions. Practice chords around the circle of fourths, in all inversions, and with substitutions, in etudes drills, and other contexts. Accompanying audio tracks let you practice the techniques and perform them with a live band.

You will learn to:

• Become a more expressive and versatile guitarist through developing a wider chord vocabulary of types and voicing options, learning to play with accuracy, tone, and a strong rhythmic feel.

• Construct, understand, and play common and advanced chord types up, down, and across the fingerboard: triads, seventh chords, power chords, chords with tensions, and others.

• Develop an intuitive understanding of how chords are built, from simple power chords and triads to four-part chords with altered tensions.

• Choose chord voicings that make your accompanying parts and improvisations sound smoother – with harmonically sophisticated shapes that are easier to play.