Nice to see this thread really took off! I’ve been incredibly busy last weeks so hadn’t had a chance yet to see all your latest responses.
@mem I would suggest going the route you mentioned earlier: don’t use any books, but rely on your ears and work out the chords yourself. I’ve noticed most chords you find online are all six string chords. But you usually don’t need that many notes. For example, the standard F-barre chord (in regular tuning) has six notes, but three of them are the root in different octaves. Nothing wrong with that, but you only need one (or none it all if you play with a bassist).
So please learn how chords are constructed (theory wise) and you can start finding where they are ‘hidden’ in P4 tuning.
If you are interested in Chord Melody, I suspect the course by @ImproviseForReal is great There is a lot of free material on YouTube too, a great place to start is here:
That video is for players in Standard Tuning but you can easily follow along.
@DavidW you are right speaking about hand size playing a role. One of my favourite guitarists is John Mayer. He has huge bear claws for hands. You probably know about playing notes on the low E with the thumb over? He can do that too on the A and even the D-string. No way I could ever do that
That’s great, thank you so much. The first one on your list looks interesting, and I don’t mind paying a little to help these guys. The books with just chord shapes and scales, not so much. I am enjoying the exploration myself.
A chord melody course might be a good way to progress, once I’ve got the basics. Thanks for the suggestion.
Intersting list @niborsilliw There’s more out there than I expected.
Re '3rd Millenium Guitar" - Looking at the preview pages on Google my first thought was that his diagrams looked rather similar to ones I’d come up with already by doing various sketches on ‘quadrille’ paper.
My view is that by working out these ideas & relationships myself I probably have them more deeply embedded than if I’d just read about them?
I feel the same about developing chord shapes, so having gained & understood the basic ideas I’m in no rush to expand my library at this stage.
Edited to add the following:
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all in favour of seeing multiple ways in which people describe things, but at the end of the day there’s no magic ‘Sillver Bullet’ to instant understanding & success in this or anything else.
Having said that, IFR & the mind switch/enlightenment it allows is perhaps the closest I recall ever coming to a ‘Silver Bullet’. However, even with IFR it isn’t a route to ‘instant’ understanding & success, it’s more a ‘key’ which opens a previously hidden door to understanding & success. Reaching that understanding & success is now down to me…
I seem to be doing a lot of drawings of shapes and patterns. Finding patterns I can try to memorise for each harmonic environment, where the chord notes are, which I can reach easily. The chord melody videos from David are super useful. Exploring the concept of bass-player/choir/singer, looks like a great way to approach playing.
From the image, that looks like a thing I have. It’s a DVD plus a 28p booklet most of which is transcriptions. It’s a while since I watched the video. My recollection is of an excellent & interesting demonstration (to an audience) rather than what I might consider ‘instructional’ as such.
yeah I stumbled upon that site a while ago. The content looks really nice but the design and structure are so confusing. He needs a good web designer to help him out in my opinion.
Hi Everyone, I just joined the group, this is my first time posting.
Just this past week, I started experimenting with P4 tuning. I worked through an exercise exploring drop 2, 3, and 2-4 voicings, to see how they felt. I worked through it in powerpoint, deriving some common chords from a diminished chord. Images are attached.
I’m not yet established/accomplished on guitar (spent most of the last year focusing on ear training). P4 tuning seems a logical improvement over standard tuning, at least for what I want to do with guitar, so I think I’m going to stick with it.
Welcome, Darren! I’m happy you joined the forum and I think you’ll find lots of encouragement and inspiration for your new P4 journey. I love your drawings. The love and care that you put into each drawing says so much about both your passion and your humility. It’s just incredibly sweet to see such a detailed exploration of how the notes can be combined on the fretboard. I’ve also made hundreds of drawings like this so I can totally relate to the excitement that you must feel on bringing all of these puzzle pieces together.
I don’t know if my own experience is relevant to your quest, but in my case I eventually decided that all of these observations were merely individual manifestations of a much larger (and much simpler) unifying principle. That principle is just the geometry of tonality on the fretboard. It’s kind of like how astronomers have to chart the movement of stars in the sky for a long time before they can figure out the principles that govern their movements. In our case, we need to contemplate hundreds of chord shapes before we can learn to see the underlying matrix which contains all of those shapes. But once you learn to see that matrix, you no longer need the memorized shapes because they jump out at you just like the constellations in the night sky.
So I think the most interesting question that we could ponder is this. What are all of these chord drawings trying to teach us? What is that governing principle which I’m calling the “geometry of tonality on the fretboard”? For me, it’s an understanding of two things:
The geometry of harmonic shapes. By this I mean the internal intervals within any chord form or other harmonic concept.
How these musical intervals appear visually on the fretboard. (In P4, this is such a pleasure because all of these intervals correspond to exact visual shapes which work everywhere.)
I don’t know if you’re looking for new ideas to explore in your practicing or if you just wanted to share your analysis of all of these different chord voicings (which is already excellent). But if I could suggest a path forward, one very interesting path would be to continue to meditate on these precise geometric shapes, but to look for the more general principles which unify and explain all of the point solutions that these chord drawings represent.
I’m not sure if that advice makes sense to you at this moment. Maybe a simpler way to say it is to just spend lots of time trying to connect the individual chord shapes shown in your drawing. For a given chord, can you simultaneously picture its drop 2, drop 3, drop 2-4 and even other voicings that you invent yourself? This project of unification would be a priceless outcome of this tremendous research that you’ve done. Thank you for sharing your investigations with us!
Thanks for your kind encouragement! I’m interested in learning all I can, so I really appreciate any ideas or suggestions (and the time it takes to offer them!)
Your comments are really in line with how I’ve been spending my time in the past week. I used diminished chords to derive these maps because of their symmetry and ambiguity, they seem like a logical reference point to relate the various chords and they provide really interesting movement between different chords that I’m just beginning to understand.
I’ve been putting on the Seven Worlds first harmonic environment jazz track, and just focusing on Major 7 drop 2 voicings. I play a voicing over the backing track, and then play the notes separately, recognizing each tone in the key, and the relationship between the notes on the fretboard. Before I started exploring P4 tuning, I didn’t spend much time studying chord shapes, because it just seemed like too much to memorize. The way I’ve been using these maps the last couple of days though, I think I’m starting to get a peak at “the matrix”, as you put it. Thank you for the advice. I’m starting to see the maps I worked on not as a catalog of things to memorize, but as the beginning of an exercise that could make memorization unnecessary. Hopefully I get there before I retire in 20 years.
Beautiful, Darren! It certainly won’t take 20 years. I think you’ll find that all of this will be coming together at a very exciting pace over the coming months. I like that you’re including the jam tracks in your harmonic explorations, so that there’s always a musical and melodic context. Enjoy each moment and please keep sharing your discoveries and insights here!
Hi @Darren . Welcome to the forum.
As David Reed (@ImproviseForReal ) says there are many ways to approach this. Maybe as many ways as people? LOL!
I too have been an avid drawer of diagrams. I find it interesting & useful to see other peoples ways of seeing & thinking (so thanks for yours).
I’ve mainly used illustrations of the tonal map as it flows along the fretboard, which I then study for combinations & patterns seeing how they sit & how they repeat. Here’s a text based illustration of the sort of thing I mean (the bold just highlights a four fret ‘position’ & is there because I’ve copied the illustration from something I wrote elsewhere). On paper I might then circle certain notes & relationships to highlight whatever I’m working on or thinking about.
Have any of you P4 players ever looked into the Puerto Rican Cuatro or the Bajo Sexto/Bajo Quinto from Mexico? These instruments are tuned in 4ths so there is likely a lot of technique and methods that can be learned from masters of these instruments such as Maso Rivera or Ramon Rabbit Sanchez.
I believe the PR Cuatro is tuned BEADG and the Bajo Sexto is tuned ADGCF.
There is a lot of free material on YouTube too, a great place to start is here:
