Winter 2025 • TedGreene.com Newsletter

ADVANCE TO NEW ITEMS >>

New Years Greetings!

We start 2025 with a thoughtful musical introspective article by Leon White.

Ted and Melody

The winter and the holiday months bring us to the end of another year. The weather and the darkness prohibit travel for many of us here in North America. We face a new year however, and Ted’s gifts to us all continue to bring light and warmth to something we all love. I’d like to get a little “mushy” and share some emotional ideas.

I have the pleasure to work with students who have questions about Ted and one subject in particular that I’d like to share: melody.

Ted’s reputation regarding chords, harmony, and his playing seemingly often lead us away from a hidden gift of his – melody. I recommend a particular page from Ted for all of us to revisit, as I recently have. On the site we have a page of his on the emotions he had identified and listed. Using his gift of language he described (in his detailed list fashion) the various emotions that he recognized in music. (Download Moods and Feelings)

These words meant something to him musically. He could share those emotions musically – without the descriptive labels – in a variety of settings and with his extensive toolset. (We’ll come back to this.)
This page of emotions is perhaps the most profound written language he ever gathered in one place. It lists, in detail, the subtleties and nuances of the feelings he believed could be expressed in music, and that he could invoke in his playing. Whew!

We are presented with Ted’s beautiful chord melody performances and the baroque improvisations. But we rarely dig-in to the melodies his chords deliver inside his voicings and progressions. Ted’s ‘chord solos’ really give all of us two incredible gifts – the beauty of his melodic creativity, AND, the emotion that he creates in his audiences. And it is deliberate. That is perhaps his most powerful and beautiful art. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, Ted was a big fan of film scores. In particular, the great scores of 1930 – 1960 or so (before the hip jazz combo scores of movies like Dirty Harry by Lalo Shifrin). That was the era of the grand sweeping music of composers like Max Steiner.

While Ted could invoke an orchestral effect using six strings, most of us don’t aspire to that, and many new generation players aren’t even aware of the ‘old movies.’ Modern scores – courtesy of John Williams and his comrades – have brought orchestral music back to movies, but who cares? We’re not orchestras! But the scores are created intentionally to deliver emotions to support the film, characters, or plot. Ted realized this, and he decided to mine all that music to find the emotional content hidden there. As a result, Ted could create the subtle beautiful emotions we all absorb while we’re watching his chords fly by. And it was intentional, melodic, and very powerful. The beauty of his music rests on his understanding of these subtle emotions he heard in film scores, and brought to his guitar – all six strings. (And of course he did the same thing for all classical music.)

Ted was often asked why he didn’t play a 7-string guitar like his hero George Van Eps. Like other students and friends, I heard his answer often: “I’m still working on using six strings.” (or a variation of that comment).

And so, in trying to answer my students’ questions about melody, I returned to Ted’s music, both live and taught. And I think I found the underlying engine for the beauty of all his playing. He wasn’t inspired by scales or inversions. But he did employ them, melodically, to evoke the emotions he was feeling – or the emotions he wanted to share. He discovered, catalogued, analyzed, and learned the musical expression of emotion. And while we all admire the rich harmonic music his chord melody delivered, his Baroque improvisations did the very same thing with only a few notes (typically broken triads – two notes, or even one note, supporting a single line melody). And he improvised all that!

When he and I were just sitting around I’d often request that he interpret one melody in different styles (as I was trying to learn to do this). For example, we were discussing the Casablanca score (by Max Steiner, 1943), and I asked him to render that song with “the big western” treatment. With only a slight pause he took “As Time Goes By” and turned it into a piece that could easily fit as a part of the film “How the West Was Won.” And I pursued it – “How about Baroque?” “How about a simple child’s melody?” He kept up, until we laughed ourselves to a halt. (I did ask him what he was doing, however. You’d have to grab those moments with him whenever you could.)

I’ve looked at hundreds of improvising videos on YouTube, and the one thing I’ve never heard is a discussion of emotion driving an improvised single line solo. That’s not easy to explain, and I’ll admit it is certainly an advanced topic on many levels. But I think there is one Ted-gift under the tree we might have overlooked. It is the brilliant, profound, and beautiful music that each of us might create if we took a few pages from Ted’s emotions list, and gave their expression our voices. Ted showed us that it could be done in all musical styles, and perhaps we can try it too.

While looking forward to a new year, this is also a time to look back. We’d like to thank you all for the support you provide, and to all those who help the site exist. While it can be a joy to work on, it isn’t always easy, and to all those who make the effort we want to say “Thank You, again.” 2025 will be the 20th anniversary of TedGreene.com coming online. That’s a long time! There’s a whole new generation of players arriving on the music scene, and many of them are discovering Ted for the first time, and yet we still have plenty of work to do in getting all of Ted’s music lessons and study pages posted. We appreciate any help with directing the new players to discover Ted and his music and teachings.

Happy New Year!
~ Leon White and your friends on the TedGreene.com team

NEW ITEMS

ARRANGEMENTS:
* Original “Western - Family” Theme, 1978-02-15. [This is Ted’s notes for an original composition that is featured on the collection of recordings of Ted with Rowanne Mark. You can download an improved version of this file from our Audio section here. Of course, on this recording Ted was embellishing that theme with an intro, modulations, and quite a bit of thematic development. This chart shows his skeletal composition. New notation, plus suggested grids have been added. Note that the recording and the chart are both from 1978.]

Under the “Lead Sheet Written by Ted” section:
* Girl Talk – Lead Sheet / Outline, circa 1968. [This page is one of Ted’s “roadmaps” for creating an arrangement or comping study. He wrote this before his 1974 student arrangement write-up (which can be found in the Arrangements section). Here he wrote out the chords to the 2nd and 3rd phrases only, and we extracted the rest of the harmonic choices from his 1974 arrangement, and then matched them all up with the melody and lyrics.]

AUDIO:
* We updated Ted’s “Original Theme” that can be found in the “Ted Greene with Rowanne Mark” recording collection. We used some state-of-the-art noise-reduction software to improve the clarity.

BAROQUE:
* Baroque Cycle of 4ths, 1984-01-15. [Thirteen short studies in 3/4 time, plus a theme for development in 4/2 time. New notation for easy reading.]

* Baroque Cycle of 4ths Progressions in 2 Voices, 1982-05-21. [Thirteen examples of cycle of 4ths (I to IV), or descending 3rd progressions, using 2 voices, and 2 going to 3 voices. New notation provided.]

* Bass and Harmonically Organized 2-Part Counterpoint, 1984-02-10. [1-to-1 counterpoint, following a progression of I-IV-V-I. New notation provided for easy reading and study.]

CHORD STUDIES:
* 9th Chord Tonality, 1978-08-25. [Ted wrote these short studies for dominant 9th chord sounds, and the first six are like chord-streams. New notation and suggested grid diagrams provided.]

* Choice Dominant Voicings by Soprano, 1993-07-31. [This is a collection of 32 of some of Ted’s favorite dominant chord forms, given as grid chord diagrams.]

* Chords by Bass – Key of A Minor, 1976-03-20. [Ted was always on a quest to map out and find all the possibilities of various chord voicings. That quest ultimately led him to develop his V-System. This page shows some early attempts to discover the chords in the key of A minor with A in bass (Root position). New notation provided for easy reading.]

* Embellishment of A Dominant 7th, 1978-07-04. [Ted subtitled this page, “Systematic thinking on dominant 7th with moving lines.” These include 2-note moving voices surrounding various dominant chord shapes, which include some chromatic or passing tones. These are very useful moves to add whenever you need a little something to fill in over a dominant chord. Notation provided married with Ted’s original grid diagrams.]

FUNDAMENTALS:
* String Transference and Chord Voicings Quiz, 1976-05-25. [Ted created this quiz to hammer home the principle of string transference. An additional “Answers” page is included to check your work…no peeking!]

HARMONY & THEORY:
* Borrowed Major, Mixed Major, Major Polychord, and Cycle Majors Tonality, 1977-07-16, 1980-04-08. [This page is a collection of various progressions using a variety of just major type chords. Ted was very specific in his chord symbols to indicate the bass and soprano voices. Knowing a bit about figured bass notation will be helpful for example #3: A 6/4 chord means 2nd inversion triad. And under the Miscellaneous Ideas section, a 6/5 chord means a 1st inversion 7th chord. Retyped and redrawn grids provided.]

* Chords in 3rds, 6ths, 10ths, and Triads, 1978. [Ted shows us some double-line chord scales (and a few triadic chord streams) that can be an excellent resource for fills over specific chords. This is an interesting and useful collection of musical ideas.]

* Common Chord Types, 1977-07-18. [For major family chord types, using Eb root for examples. Ted notated this on the Grand Staff (both bass and treble clefs), and seems to be written more for theoretical purposes rather than practical, as some of the chords are more than six voices, and many are not easily applicable for guitar, but better suited for piano.]

* Complete Chart of Chord Types, 1978-07-15, 1979-01-29, 1980-04-17. [Ted labeled this as the “‘almost’ complete chart…” Again, here our Chord Chemist is on his unending quest for documenting all possible chord voicings, systematically mapped out. Undoubtedly, this page was part of his thinking as he worked on developing his V-System of 4-note chord voicing system. New notation provided.]

* Harmony, circa 1973. [This article is a continuation of Ted’s 5-page series on “Cadences.” It covers some excellent intermediate fundaments like temporary modulations, secondary dominants, pivot chords, creating lines between two given chords, the 4-3 suspension, modulations in the minor key, and more. Retyped with newly drawn graphics, this series will be an excellent one to study.]

SINGLE-NOTE SOLOING:
* Pentatonic Melodic Combinations for Single-Line, 1982-02-21. [Hundreds of 4-note patterns for use over Dm6/9. The red notes indicate the variable in the sequence at hand. I believe that Ted intended the student to continue each pattern up or down to the next octave as well. Ted also wrote, “Many patterns sound great with sustained points and multiple sustains.” Retyped notation.]

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* Of course, most of the videos are posted right here in our Video Section

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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - My Life with The Chord Chemist - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

My Life with The Chord Chemist
A Memoir of Ted Greene, Apotheosis of Solo Guitar
By Barbara Franklin

BUY NOW - Available at amazon.com

Publication Date: Nov 24 2009
Page Count: 276
Trim Size: 8" x 10"

ABOUT THE BOOK
A retrospective of Ted Greene, virtuoso solo guitarist, beloved music teacher, world-renowned author and innovator of unique music concepts for guitar. This book also includes an overview of Ted Greene's early life and musical development, plus an insightful narrative of the 13 years prior to his death

Six agonizing months after losing my beloved Ted, I slowly emerged from a state of profound disbelief, almost coma-like. At that time I didn’t know what to do with the remnants of my life; then a path began to unfold before me. This website was started and became a saving grace.

During the ensuing years, I organized and categorized Ted’s material and personal studies. Upon completion of that massive undertaking, once again, I didn’t know what to do, so I began writing.

I wrote pages, and then threw them away, until once again a path began to unfold. What I wrote is mostly a personal memoir. I suppose it was what I had to write first.

From the preface:

“The decision to reveal parts of our personal life was something I deliberated over for a long time. Because our lives became so inextricably bound, I included what I felt necessary, but not without a considerable amount of apprehension. This book illustrates the many parallels between Ted the musician and Ted the person. I felt it was important to convey how Ted was driven compulsively not just to pursue music, but so many other things he loved.”

With this in mind, here is our story. It IS very personal and I still have apprehensions about publishing it. My hope is that it brings you closer to Ted, as you begin to get to know and understand this unique and extraordinary man and musician.

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