Theodore Greene was born on September 26, 1946, in Los Angeles. He got his first guitar in 1957, at eleven, took lessons from the local jazz guitarist Sal Tardella, and in 1960 joined his first band, the Cage Kings. Rock and roll and R&B pulled at his ears as a teenager, and he played with local rock and R&B bands while still in high school. He briefly studied accounting at California State University, Northridge, then left to give his time to music. Left-handed by nature, he chose to play right-handed.

By the mid-1960s he was teaching at Ernie Ball's music shop in Tarzana, California, and his pupil list grew until there was a waiting list of about two years. He kept playing around Los Angeles in rock and blues groups, among them Bluesberry Jam (from 1967), whose drummer Fito de la Parra later joined Canned Heat. A friend of the composer Joseph Byrd, he played guitar on Byrd's The American Metaphysical Circus (Columbia Masterworks, 1969), recorded under the name Joe Byrd and the Field Hippies with a studio band that also included the saxophonist Tom Scott, and he did commercial studio work with Byrd into the early 1970s. In 1977 Byrd called on him again to supply guitar tablature for three arrangements of Bix Beiderbecke's piano music on Ry Cooder's album Jazz.

Greene's reputation among guitarists rests first on his books. Chord Chemistry appeared in 1971, after Dale Zdenek, the owner of the shop where Greene taught, proposed a book built on his hand-drawn chord diagrams; Greene wrote a new work instead of compiling the old sheets. Modern Chord Progressions followed, and in the late 1970s the two volumes of Jazz Guitar Single Note Soloing. In 1978 he took about eight weeks of lessons from the seven-string guitar pioneer George Van Eps. He also gave seminars at the Guitar Institute of Technology and wrote columns and articles for Guitar Player, including a 1998 piece on Wes Montgomery. Most of his income came from private teaching: thousands of one-on-one lessons for which he wrote detailed handouts on voice leading, chord melody and keyboard harmony adapted for guitar, many of them drawing on classical sources such as the Bach chorales.

His only album under his own name, Solo Guitar, was recorded in 1977 and released that year on the Professional Music Products label (catalog A-5010). Produced by William Perry and Leon White, it is eight standards played alone on electric guitar with no overdubbing: "They Can't Take That Away from Me," a "Summertime" and "It Ain't Necessarily So" medley, "Send in the Clowns," "Ol' Man River," "Watch What Happens," "A Certain Smile," "Danny Boy" and "Just Friends." The sound has a rotary phasing shimmer made by recording the guitar both directly and through a small Leslie speaker. The album went out of print and circulated for years among guitarists before Art of Life Records reissued it on CD in 2004, remastered from the original tapes under Greene's supervision. Reviewers called it a landmark of solo guitar, and the guitarist Steve Vai and, in a 1982 conversation with Robert Fripp, John McLaughlin both singled out his harmonic command.

Greene did little more recording. He played duets with the Los Angeles guitarist John Pisano on two Pablo albums, Among Friends (1995) and Conversation Pieces (1997), and appeared on the blues album Mojo Blues by Will Ray (2002). He preferred accompanying singers to group work and played occasional club and restaurant dates in the San Fernando Valley, usually on a Fender Telecaster; in 1982 Fender asked him to play its new 1952 Telecaster reissue at the NAMM show, after he had helped with the design by drawing on his collection of vintage Telecasters. He died of a heart attack in his apartment in Encino on July 23, 2005, at the age of 58. Since then his students and his partner Barbara Franklin, who wrote the 2009 memoir My Life with the Chord Chemist, have posted his lesson sheets, arrangements and recordings on tedgreene.com, which was still being updated in 2026. The tribute CD Ted Greene Remembered (El Dorado Records, 2007) gathered guitarists he had influenced and two rare recordings of Greene himself, and in 2015 the guitarist Terrence McManus published the book Ted Greene: Sound, Time, and Unlimited Possibility.

Greene played fingerstyle and used the guitar the way a pianist uses the keyboard: melody, inner voices and a moving bass line at once, often with harp-like arpeggios and a gentle neck vibrato that gives sustained chords a shimmer. He could walk a bass line under a melody, and he used counterpoint to improvise in different historical manners, treating "Autumn Leaves" in a Baroque style, for example. His voicings often make a single guitar sound like two players. Although he is widely regarded as a jazz guitarist, and his books and his one album sit in the jazz chord-melody tradition, he moved comfortably between standards, blues, gospel and Baroque chorales, and he taught that harmony and voice leading mattered more than scale patterns. A Los Angeles reviewer of Solo Guitar heard in it the techniques of Joe Pass, George Van Eps and Lenny Breau, and Ken Dryden of AllMusic compared him to Pass, Bucky Pizzarelli and Martin Taylor, while Scott Yanow heard a kinship with Van Eps. Admirers outside jazz included Steve Vai, the pianist George Winston and Dweezil Zappa.