For two months now, we’ve been investigating quartal harmony and learning how to use fourths as building blocks for our chord voicings, rather than the traditional thirds. We’ve looked
In the ’60s, jazz pianist McCoy Tyner helped popularize quartal harmony when playing with John Coltrane. The great Lenny Breau brought those edgy sounds to jazz guitar, and today they appear in contemporary bluegrass, blues, funk, and rock. Learn how to incorporate these fresh and restless voicings into your own chordal playing.
In this third and final part of our series, we’ll integrate some of the different forms we’ve discovered thus far and continue to blanket the fretboard with fresh chordal colors.
There are many ways to voice chords on guitar. One of the coolest is to steal a technique from choral, horn, and string arranging that yields a rich, molten sound. And it’s easy, once you know the basic rules.
We guitarists can learn a lot from such soul-jazz organists as the incomparable Jimmy Smith. Ready to explore some classic B-3 moves? Break out the swirl box and have at it!
