An experimental guide book and online platform exploring guitar chords that ring and jangle with open strings (and only a few notes fretted), offering new ways to play, compose, and freak out on the guitar. The project resonates with the folksy guitar player as well as with seasoned shredders looking to add a new dimension to their playing, and incorporates interviews with intriguing folk, jazz, pop, and experimental guitarist-composers.

Take those chords you play around the campfire — with the easy-to-grab shapes that you learn first on the guitar (think E minor, D, G, A: no barre chords!) — and expand their ringing quality all over the guitar neck, using lateral tricks and helpful adjustments to create new ways of songwriting and lush, unique, new guitar sounds.

The book and online platform are a project of New York City-based session guitarist, composer, and environmentalist Tom Csatari, who leads the 12-piece, New York Times-featured “free folk-jazz” collective ensemble Uncivilized.

This project is currently in its design and development phase (interviews are being scheduled; diagrams are being written; prose is being edited; concepts expanded; etc.) but the work is ongoing, with no formal home. If you would like to be involved with the project, please consider writing Tom directly, or sending money through the PayPal button below. We have included a solo acoustic guitar track below which demonstrates some of these concepts as an initial starting point — a single out on Tiny Montgomery Records:

There is also a song from Tom’s big-band project Uncivilized which uses a “freak-jazz” chord as the basis of an environmental, free-folk composition from the song “Glass Parachutes”:

Please consider donating towards the project today — direct to Tom through PayPal: