Fourths Tuning: Chords and Inversions

By Graham Tippett

The guitar has one design flaw everybody has agreed to ignore

Five of the six string pairs on your guitar are a perfect fourth apart. One is a major third. That single inconsistency between the G and B strings is why every chord shape you know has to be bent out of alignment when it crosses those two strings, why your barre chords have that awkward finger, and why nothing on the fretboard transposes cleanly. It's a workaround you've been paying for since the day you started.

Tune the B up to C and the E up to F and it's gone. Every pair a fourth, every shape valid on any set of strings, the whole neck symmetrical.

Learn a third of what you used to

This is the part nobody tells you. In standard tuning a chord type has to be learned separately for each string group because the shapes don't survive the crossing. In fourths they do - one voicing, moved anywhere, unchanged. The practical effect is roughly two thirds less to memorise for the same vocabulary.

Over thirty chord types

Open chords, closed triads, spread voicings, and on through the extended and altered chords you need for jazz. It's the complete working vocabulary, sequenced so each chord type builds on the last rather than arriving as an isolated grip, with diagrams you can read at a glance.

Who it's for

Guitarists making the switch from standard tuning who need their harmonic vocabulary back first. Players already in fourths who have been improvising chord shapes by trial and error. And anyone who has read about fourths tuning, been intrigued, and wanted to know what actually happens to the chords before retuning their guitar.

There is very little material published on this tuning. This is where I'd start.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 154965991X
• ISBN13: 9781549659911
• Release Date: September 2017
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 50 Pages
• Weight: 0.26 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.1" x 8.0" x 10.0"