Chords from the Top
Almost every chord book ever printed sorts chords by their root. All the C chords, then the C sharps, then the Ds. It’s a sensible way to print a book and a useless way to play one. It’s also why most guitarists own eighty voicings and use six.
Here’s the problem with that: the root is the least important note in a chord. Nobody hears it. The bass player has it, it sits in the muddiest part of the range, and your listener worked out the chord a bar ago.
What a listener actually tracks is the highest note. It moves like a melody, and everything underneath gets heard as accompaniment to it. That’s why two guitarists playing the same progression can sound like two different musicians.
Chords from the Top re-files the chords you already own around the note people actually hear. Nine chapters, one idea, from triads to voice leading.
PDF is the colour edition. Paperback interior prints black and white — the diagrams were designed to work either way.
This is not a chord dictionary
No lookup section. No grid of shapes by key. No appendix of 500 voicings. If you want a reference to keep on the music stand, this isn’t it, and I’d rather say so now than take your money.
It also won’t give you more chords. You almost certainly have enough. It re-files what you already own, which will do more for you in a month than another fifty shapes would do in a year.
Try it before you buy anything
Play a C major chord. Any one. Now play it again with a different note on top.
Same harmony, same symbol on the page, completely different musical statement. Nothing about the analysis changed. Everything about the sound changed.
If you heard that, the book will make sense to you.
What’s in the book
- Triads filed by the note on top — one chord seen from three angles rather than three shapes to memorise, moved across the string sets
- Four seventh chords that are one shape — major seventh, dominant, minor seventh and half-diminished, with a single note moving between them
- Why taking notes out makes a chord sound bigger — shells and guide tones, and which note goes first
- Ninths, elevenths and thirteenths with no new grips at all — built entirely from triads you already know, sitting over a different bass note
- Slash chords — one question resolves the whole notation
- Voice leading by top note — including the sound of the change to the IV chord in a blues you’ve played ten thousand times without knowing what produced it
- Wide voicings made by omission — skipping strings rather than adding notes
- Comping, chord melody, and rhythm playing that isn’t strumming
NO NOTATION REQUIRED. ALMOST NO THEORY BEYOND “A TRIAD IS THREE NOTES”.
Who it’s for
Self-taught players, usually somewhere between fifteen and forty years in, who can get through a song without wrong notes and can hear that it sounds flat. Not wrong — flat. Like someone reading a list correctly.
Mostly blues, soul, pop, rock and country players. That’s where the examples come from. You need open chords, barre chords, and the ability to read a chord diagram. That’s it.
Not for you if you’re a beginner, you want a reference to look chords up in, you’re trying to learn standard notation, you’re after songs or tab, or you specifically want a jazz method. The approach comes from that world; the book doesn’t live there.
The free chord builder
There’s a chord builder on this site that thinks the same way. Rather than handing you a finished shape, it builds a chord from the ground up, one interval at a time, so you watch the thing being assembled instead of memorising the result. You end up with the chord’s structure laid out across the whole fretboard — and once you can see where every chord tone sits, you can see which ones are available on top.
Free, no sign-up. Use it alongside the book, or use it first to work out whether this way of thinking suits you.
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