The Chord Factory: Build Your Own Guitar Chord Dictionary

One of the most challenging things about playing guitar is that, unlike other instruments, the exact same pitches can be found in multiple places all over the neck. While this idiosyncrasy creates tremendous creative possibilities, it also creates a seemingly infinite amount of chords that one must master.Virtually every chord diagram I have ever seen uses solid black dots to indicate the fingerings. This includes all of the books I encountered and used when studying at Berklee in the 80s (I never studied with Jon, but like everyone, I knew he was a monster player). While this approach is good for quickly grabbing chords, it does nothing to help the player understand the interrelations of the notes and how they really fit together. Enter this masterful volume.I can't tell you how much, in my early 40s, I wish I'd had this book 25 years ago. Standard guitar chord dictionaries are simply lists of chords and are fine as references. But again, they don't give you much beyond that. By providing the essential "architecture" of chords, then leaving it up to the reader to literally "build" their own dictionary by hand, Damian succeeds in imbuing the reader with the tools to find his/her unique solutions in many contexts. Starting with a fretboard diagram, then simple intervals and triads, the reader is gradually indoctrinated to a new way of viewing the fretboard. And you label each chord with the chord tones, not back dots. Life changing! (BTW, Jon sticks to the construction metaphor consistently, and it isn't merely a gimmick. It is a logical and helpful way to view chord theory.)This book is not for the lazy. If you are seriously interested in making your own dictionary, it will require some serious time and effort. And it is probably not for the novice player. I have been playing for 30 years and, though the theory involved isn't terribly challenging at this point in my career, actually creating some of the 5-part chord templates has been a challenge. At times, I feel like I am doing some type of weird Sudoku! But it is a challenge I have been relishing and I have already learned so much in the few weeks I have been building my dictionary. My vision of the fretboard has gotten a real overhaul. That alone makes this book invaluable to me.

I wasn't convinced of the value of this book when I first looked through it. And the glowing endorsements on the cover (e.g. by Jim Hall) seemed like they might be a bit overblown.But I was wrong -- this is an absolutely fantastic book. If you go through it systematically you can't help but understand the fretboard at a very deep level, and you'll pick up tons of chord voicings. One of the 3 or 4 indispensable guitar books IMO.

Super in-depth book here. This was one book I didn't get when I was a student at Berklee, but after talking to a few fellow teachers it was highly recommended. If you're really looking to dive into chords and chord theory this is a great book. It'll greatly help your understanding at any level and will help you create your own fresh chord progressions. Great book!

I've been playing and teaching guitar for many years and have owned stacks of method books and I must say that this is one of the coolest books on the topic of chords that I've ever encountered.This book epitomizes what music should be: simultaneously creative and fun!Thank you Jon Damian!!!

Brilliant. Beginner or advanced Jon has a way of thinking that is unique and inspiring. The guitar chord crossword puzzle in the back is worth the price of the book alone. Brilliant!!!

Great book by a great teacher and guitarist. Written in a fun way.

A must for any guitar player. I believe it would be a bit difficult for a beginner. But if compose/write you cannot live without this book.

This is an excellent book for improving your harmonic knowledge in the guitar. You will study everything from intervals played harmonically (dyads) to slash chords. Lots of dedication needed.

Most guitar players will be familiar with the idea of the chord dictionary. These books are compendia of chord voicings, with indicated fingerings, sometimes with photographic illustration of the 'grip' in question, sometimes with the chord written out in musical notation. Bulky examples are Warren Nunes'  Jazz Guitar Chord Bible Complete  and the Hal Leonard  Picture Chord Encyclopedia , but there are many, many others, including Berklee's useful  Berklee Rock Guitar Chord Dictionary  and  Berklee Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary . They tend to differ from each other only in the way that the chords are grouped and in how many different chord types and voicings of each type are included. There tends to be an unthinking assumption that bigger is better.Many a guitar player has purchased one of these tomes after learning a handful of chords in the open position and a couple of moveable barre chords. It seems like a logical next step on the way to becoming a better musician: learn more chords.In fact, chord dictionaries have major drawbacks as instructional tools. Properly-instructed musicians do not learn like this. Dictionaries present the learner's task almost exactly backwards, tending to overwhelm the player with hundreds of alternative voicings, without any indication of how they have been constructed, which voicings are most usable in practice, or how they may be connected to make real music. Even as reference tools they are of questionable value, since the player has to have some idea of what he or she is looking for. They never address the problem of how the player is supposed to retain in the memory what may be over 2,000 chords, many of which are small variations on others or enharmonic equivalents.Jon Damian is an excellent musician and guitar player (the two are not always synonymous), and he approaches the problem of expanding the player's chordal understanding and vocabulary in a musical manner, by getting down to basics and requiring the player to learn from the ground up how chords are constructed from the simplest elements. This has two major advantages. It is a genuinely progressive method, as everything learned at each stage serves as the foundation for the next stage of learning. Moreover, it rewards the player's effort directly - this really is a book that offers returns proportional to the effort you are prepared to make.Instead of presenting the player with endless pages of chord boxes, Damian explains how chords are built up from intervals. He begins with a single note, pointing out that even a single note is actually a chord (thanks to the harmonic series), and progressing through two-note chords to triads, four-note chords and so on. At each stage he requires the player to find every variation of the chord under discussion on the fretboard. The player literally constructs his own chord dictionary as he progresses (writing out the chords on photocopies from supplied templates) so that by the end of the book he or she possesses both a logically ordered compendium in which every chord is thoroughly understood, and a good knowledge of both note locations on the fingerboard and the underlying principles of its intervallic organisation.By the time three-note chords are discussed, the player sees that the author is insisting that he understands the intervallic structure of chords - the musical logic of their construction - rather than rote-memorising a series of unconnected 'grips'. The method Damian has chosen allows him to introduce fundamental concepts of chord connection - for example, guide tones, and hence the principles of voice leading - in a natural manner. As an experienced player, he offers a clear account of how the guitarist deals with the problem of negotiating complex extended and altered chords while being able to call on only four left-hand fingers and a maximum of six strings. At every stage he offers musical examples that really work - with credible, detailed explanations of why a particular voicing is preferred. In effect, the player learns deep lessons of musicality rather than just guitar-playing that will allow him or her to grow as a musician.I found this book refreshing and genuinely useful. It requires the player to do a lot of work, but repays that work. It takes us deep into the realms of complex art but allows the player to halt at any level and be productive at that level. It forces the player to stop thinking like a guitarist who has memorised a series of cliches and start thinking like a musician - one of the clearest differences between Damian's book and others is that from the very beginning the player is encountering unusual but very playable and musical voicings that build up logically from the basic principles, rather than being simply the obvious easily-fingered 'grips' that fall under every player's hand (although all those voicings are here too). At every stage the player is shown the thinking behind the omission or inclusion of particular tones, and which extended or altered tones are best substituted for which basic chordal tones. The book includes, almost as a passing gift, one of the best discussions of how to incorporate open strings I have encountered.A couple of caveats.The author has a rather folksy sense of humour. You may not find this a problem. He has chosen to illustrate his text by including a cartoon character - 'Chester' - who pops up periodically throughout the book to make 'amusing' remarks to which the author responds. Whether this was intended to lighten what might otherwise seem too scholarly a mood or to make the book more accessible to the young I cannot judge. Suffice it to say that by Chester's third appearance I wanted to kill him; by the tenth, the sight of Chester with his fingers in his mouth had me feeling that death was too good for him. This is a shame, since the book is so good, and Jon Damian's explanations of musical matters are anything but simplistic or patronising. The result is an unevenness of tone that may reflect an uncertainty on the author's part as to his intended audience. If you find Chester as irritating as I did, you will just have to tough it out and avoid looking at the margins in which he lurks.Finally, the book is usable by a committed beginning player, but is really aimed at a someone who is a little more advanced and is serious about learning. For those who can't read standard notation, there is little use of it here, but the player who is prepared to use the right-hand fingers or a pick-and-fingers style will find many of the examples easier to negotiate. Familiarity with the conventions of chord spelling and the circle of fifths will help. There are plenty of chords here that use non-adjacent strings. There are also plenty of out-of-position stretches, but it should be stressed that the player is introduced to these progressively and encouraged to try awkward examples in the higher positions first. (Damian is also one the few authors who acknowledges freely that certain voicings that are technically possible are also practically unusable unless you have hands as big as Jimi Hendrix's or Tal Farlow's.)I recommend this book wholeheartedly for any player in any musical style who wishes to really get inside chordal playing and suspects that chord dictionaries are not telling the whole story. It's as intelligently written as Mick Goodrick's  Advancing Guitarist  and as useful as Steve Khan's  Contemporary Chord Khancepts (Jazz Masters) , which are the two books aimed explicitly at the guitarist that I've found most useful so far and which come closest to what Jon Damian has achieved here. Jazz Guitar Chord Bible CompletePicture Chord EncyclopediaBerklee Rock Guitar Chord DictionaryBerklee Jazz Guitar Chord DictionaryAdvancing GuitaristContemporary Chord Khancepts (Jazz Masters)

Paul Bowes has really written the definitive review of Jon Damian's book and in a real sense no more need be said. However, I would reiterate that "The Chord Factory" is about getting to grips with what the guitar is all about and chords are the medium by which Damian provides his brilliant instruction on really knowing your instrument.Do yourself a favour - buy this book and work through it.

Libro veramente completo e di assouto riferimento per la comprensione degli accordi su uno strumento diabolico come la chitarra :)Ovviamente la lingua inlgese può rappresentare un ostacolo, visto anche che in certi passaggi il testo è abbastanza ostico, ma se si vuole raggiungere la piena padronanza degli accordi su chitarra è un libro immancabile..... magari studiato con tranquillità e prendendosi il tempo giusto per digerirlo come si deve.

Llegó justo a tiempo. Muchas gracias.

super book. Very detailed. Well worth the purchase.