At 3:33 Pat Metheny starts playing open voiced triads. When I heard this for the first time, I was blown away by the beauty of it. It made me want to study again. But I didn’t want to just copy Pat. What I was after, was to play freely with these arpeggios and chords, just like Pat. He is just improvising here, but what and how do you practice to make this happen for yourself?

At least I was inspired and ready to pick up the guitar again after almost a decade. Then I remembered I had a book called “Chord Chemistry”. I started reading and was a bit overwhelmed by the information in that book. The cover said that the author was Ted Greene. I didn’t know who he was, so I googled him. This has literally changed my life…

Ted Greene was a very good teacher, guitarist and improviser. Although he is not among us anymore, many of his former students where allowed to video record their private lessons at Ted’s place. A lot of this material is shared either via Youtube or via www.tedgreene.com. What Ted did, like many other great musicians, was to take a very small or isolated topic, and explore any permutation you can come up with. Write it down and play with it until you have mastered it completely. Only then, move on to the next topic. Keep things simple and repeat them over and over again until they have become a part of you.