About The Synthase Guide to Chords: Descriptions, Voicings, and Examples for Commonly-Heard Chords
FREE September 20-24 , 2021
A coffee table book for your phone or tablet, The Synthase Guide to Chords connects you to the flavor and personality of eleven chords commonly heard across many genres of music. In addition to suggested voicings notated on a staff and on a keyboard, each chord is featured on the Keyring, an innovative visualization tool that unifies every possible instance of a chord into a single shape. Inspired by Peterson field guides and D.C. Peattie’s A Natural History of North American Trees, composer-educator Nate May writes lovingly and knowledgeably about each chord as it appears in real songs and pieces, as well as how to use it in new ones.
From the preface:
I’m guilty of this, and I don’t think I’m alone: I snitch samples of raw ingredients while cooking. Little slices of carrots, tofu, or celery will just casually… disappear. I mostly do this because I feel like it, but it has another advantage: it helps me know my materials better. My goal in cooking, as in music, is to make a whole greater than the sum of the parts. In order for that to happen, I have to be able to savor the parts on their own, and help them open up a window to the whole.
This chord guide is meant to serve that purpose. It’s not a comprehensive guide to calculating every voicing and fingering, but an invitation to sample raw chord-ingredients and learn how other composer-chefs use them. It can also be useful as a traditional field guide—when you encounter a chord in a piece of music, this guide can help you identify it and learn more about it.
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Author Bio:
Recognized by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Yale School of Music, Nate May is a versatile American composer and improviser whose music has been heard across four continents: in jazz clubs and DIY spaces, on radio and television, in museums and modern dance venues, and on mainstage classical events at New York’s Sheen Center, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and others. Also an award-winning educator, he has served as a teaching artist with the American Composers Orchestra and taught courses at Yale University, Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music, Montclair State University, the Walden School, and the Thurnauer school. Currently a doctoral candidate in composition at Yale, he holds degrees from Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music (M.M., Composition) and the University of Michigan (B.F.A., Jazz and Contemplative Studies). In 2021 he founded Synthase, an online school for music creators.