Tuning Dilemma - Perfect 4ths vs Standard

lysander · June 2017

Shoutout for all 4ths players, do you find it easy to go back and forth between P4 and standard tuning ?

After a 5 ish year break of playing the guitar ( due to a mixture of frustration, lack of time and enjoying playing the piano more ) I've come back to it a few months ago and decided to play in all fourths.

Overall for general playing I love it - I find it more intuitive and liberating and I find it really helps my improvisation as I can much more naturally mix and match licks all over the neck, and find intervals.

Some great closed voicing chords have to be sacrificed but that's an acceptable price for me.

On the downside, I do(did) like playing a bit of Van Halen, Extreme and other rock guitaristy things and a lot of it can only be played in standard tuning.

As I want to get back into that side of things I will probably need to be used to doing both if I want to continue on the P4 route.

Do you guys find that you can easily switch back and forth or is it messing with your brain and playing too much ?

I'm hoping that, just like left vs right handed driving it's fairly easy to do with a bit of additional concentration for the first few minutes but I would be interested to hear some thoughts from more experienced P4 players.

MatthewShreddery · June 2017

I've stopped playing in P4 tuning now, but I didn't find it all that difficult to go back and forth between the two tunings, at least not when I was practicing 4ths.
Now I'd find it hard to play in P4 as I've stopped practicing it.

lysander · June 2017

Cool. I thihk / hope that by using standard tuning for repertoire only and p4 for personal / improv playing it shouldn't create too much confusion.
Why did you stop playing in 4ths out of curiosity ?

MatthewShreddery · June 2017

Thats basically what I did. I mostly gigged in standard, but studied in P4. It was a project for me. It's something I will go back to in the future as there are some things I want to try with it.

The main reason I went back to standard is because I found chord playing extremely dull and clunky in 4ths. Sure, you can get into the whole 'modern' sounding quartal harmony stuff, and yes that stuff sounds cool, but you can do all that in standard.

The guitar stopped sounding like a guitar to me in P4. Like, for me, the very essence of guitar is to strum a big open E chord and you can't even do that in P4. It's like you've stolen the instrument's soul!

I just find the guitar a fascinating thing, and the little quirk of the major third between the G and B strings can lead you down endless avenues of discovery. Sometimes this can be frustrating as you might spend months fingering something one way, then discover a really easy way to do it. But on the whole, standard is a genius tuning which facilitates fairly convenient single line fingerings, at the same time allowing for beautiful chords.

lysander · June 2017

Great post. You definitely have a point there. I am not so much into "cowboy" chords myself, but you are right that there are a lot of awesome chords that make the guitar quite special and that either rely on open B and E strings, or that require fingerings that are impossible to play in P4.
I haven't found any evidence of the other way around so far.
Weirdly I think that quartal harmony chords which are so easy in P4 don't sound very good on the guitar, even though they sound great on piano.

I also find there is a tendency to always want what we can't have, or what is harder. On the piano I often want to play lush open voiced chords that stretch my left hand, whereas on the guitar I want to stretch my hand to get those lovely closed voicing chords

MatthewShreddery · June 2017

So true!
It's not so much the cowboy chords - many of those are actually playable in P4 tuning - it was when I tried to do some Barney Kessel chordal stuff I realised P4 was going to be a problem.

Another thing for me is that as I'm getting older (36 this year) I'm becoming less and less interested in the virtuosic side of guitar playing and more interested in being a good rhythm player, plus learning jazz vocabulary etc. P4 tuning was a way for me to play licks and patterns easily, but like I say, that stuff is becoming dull to me.

viz · June 2017

Wippersnapper

lysander · June 2017

I'm pretty close age wise

I also have very little interest in shredding with a couple of exceptions, but for jazz improvisation I do find p4 more natural, especially compared to piano.

MatthewShreddery · June 2017

Yea man, don't get me wrong - I love shredding. I mean, Art Tatum shredded the hell out of the piano, and Michael Brecker the sax. But I spent so long trying to develop technique for the sake of technique, rather than learning vocabulary :-)

lysander · June 2017

Yep, been there too

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Tuning Dilemma - Perfect 4ths vs Standard

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