Here's my little journey. Trying to find my voice on the guitar, and trying to make sense of the way I play. Over time I started taking unconventional approaches, and ended up in uncommon places. I think my experience is worth sharing. I hope you'll find here something interesting to experiment with.

These are the main points I'd like to discuss

• Tuning in fourths
• Pentatonics (todo. Jerry Bergonzi's approach)
• Note Targetting (todo. Hal Galper's Forward Motion)

Better people have written much about these, but I've never found anybody who linked them together on the guitar. This is what I'll try to do here.

Guitar Tuning seems to be a religious subject for many people. Browsing the web for discussions about "all fourths" it is easy to see how the majority quickly discards it as an unnecessary gimnick for lazy people, while for others it is the holy grail of guitar playing. Wikipedia doesn't help much

The standard guitar tuning is (from the lowest note): E A D G B E. The intervals (note distance) between the various open strings are the following

From	To	Semitones/frets	Interval
E	A	5	fourth
A	D	5	fourth
D	G	5	fourth
G	B	4	major third
B	E	5	fourth

This tuning is ubiquitously used, from jazz to heavy metal, from classical to folk. The first things that jumps out from the above list is that all the intervals are fourths except the one between G and B, which is a major third. The "all fourths" tuning simply removes this anomaly, and makes each string one fourth from the adjacent ones.
The two obvious possibilities to do this are: raising the top two strings (B and E) of a semitone (to C and F, respectively) or lowering the other four. Let say we pick the first possibility. For this new tuning (E A D G C F) we have the following table of intervals

From	To	Semitones/frets	Interval
E	A	5	fourth
A	D	5	fourth
D	G	5	fourth
G	C	5	fourth
C	F	5	fourth

The standard tuning has survived the centuries (it comes from the lute) and the changes of musical styles played on the guitar. If that major third is there, it must be for very good reasons. It's honestly quite silly to pretend that the "all fourths" tuning is simply "better".
In fact (always give your opponent his best arguments!) here's a quick list of the strong points of the standard E A D G B E

• Chord roots: harmonic roots often sound better in the lower register, and can be easily played on the E and A strings. The most consonant interval after the octave is the perfect fifth (8 semitones, C to G, or E to B, or A to E). If the root is on the E string, the top two strings at the same fret are the very consonant fifth and octave. Something similar happens if the root is on the A string: the E strings (top and bottom) will contain the very consonant fifth. This gives us easy-to-play open and barre chords made of six strings, chords that can be strummed without risking to hit a "wrong" note. These are the common "cowboy chords", the first chords that we all learned on the guitar. They're easy, they sound good, and they can be used to play a huge number of songs (and are the base of the CAGED approach).
• Minor seconds: the minor second interval (one semitone, one fret, C to C#) can be quite easily incorporated in our chords, since between the G and the B string it requires only a strech of 3 frets.
• Easy basics: all the basic diatonic chords (major triads, minor triads, major 7+, dominant, minor 7), and their inversions, are easily playable as complete six-string chords. Chords with altered fifths (e.g. half-diminished) are a bit more difficult to play as full chords, but the 4-string versions are still simple enough

In addition to these points, there are very good reasons to stick to the standard tuning

• Repertoire: there's a huge repertoire based on the standard tuning, and many compositions (e.g. classical music) and styles (e.g. flamenco) are probably impossible to play in any other tuning
• Learning material: you can easily find tons of learning material (guitar tabs, videos, ...) based on the standard tuning. Not much for other tunings.
• Teachers: your teacher will probably have no experience with different tunings, and it will be harder for him to show you how to play things
• History: all the best players played with the standard tuning. Wes Montgomery, Pat Metheny, Kurt Rosenwinkel, John Scofield, Jonathan Kreisberg, Joe Pass, whoever your favorite player is, he probably played (most of the time) with the standard tuning. Why should you do anything different?

I think these are all good points. So my claim will be very limited.

I've played for 16 years using the standard tuning (rock, metal, jazz) and then, six years ago, switched to all fourths (playing mostly jazz). I'm very happy I switched, sorry I didn't do it before, and I'm not going back.

I think the guitar in general, and the tuning in particular, are simply tools that stay between the music we want to play and our human body, with all its limitations. We should simply choose the tuning that best fits our needs, and in particular a tuning should be

• Rich enough to allow us to express our music
• Simple enough to offer little resistance to our limited mental and physical abilities

There's obviously some tension between those two ideas, since richness usually comes at the cost of some complexity. There's no point in choosing a tuning simply because it's easier if we cannot play the music we want with it. Similarly we all (believe it or not, even Wes Montgomery!) have limited abilities (finger stretch, time to study, memory) and so there is no point in using a complex system, if a simpler one allows us to play the same music, since we could use the resources saved (hand comfort, time) to improve our sound, our repertoire, our phrasing. My position is that Regarding the first two points, the issue usually raised by people who consider the all-fourths as inferior is that "you cannot play chord X". It is true that some specific voicings become more difficult to play with the all-fourths, but it is also true that other interesting voicings are simpler. For example if the root is played on the bottom string (E), the top two string will contain (easily accessible at the same fret) an augmented fifth (C) and a flat nine (F), which come quite handy for altered dominants. "Cowboy chords" instead become very difficult to play, but they are not much used in jazz.

I actually took the time to write a program that figures out the playable vocings of common jazz chords for the standard tuning, the all-fourths tuning and even for the 8-string all-major-thirds tuning. Here's the output for all voicings playable without a "string skip" between the "non index" fingers, and with a max stretch of 4 frets: standard, all-fourths, all-thirds. And here's a comparison between what voicing are playable with what tuning and with what finger stretch (the notation is the following: "i" indicates the inversion, the "D" indicate what voice has been dropped and "*" indicates by how many octaves it has been dropped). There's no easy winner there. Standard and all-fourths (first two columns) are pretty much equivalent, while the all-thirds (third column) seems to make very difficult voicings possible. Here are some other charts, in case you're interested in these sorts of things. What we can easily see that is that for a given number of "sounds", the standard tuning has a lot more "shapes", depending on which strings the chord is played. Since we are really only interested in the sounds we play (unless we're trying to impress our fellow musicians with our fretboard wizardry), it should only make sense that we should should try to maximize the variety of sounds we can play and minimize the complexity and number of shapes that our fingers and brain have to memorize and recall. More on this later.

A more important point might be the following: it doesn't really matter that some chords become sligthly easier or harder. We have to remember that the guitar is not a "native" jazz instrument. While many great guitar players exist today and many have lived in the past, it is clear that most advances in the jazz vocabulary didn't come from guitar players. The guitar is a good compromise between the harmonic possibilities of a piano and the single note playing abilities (and sound expressiveness) of sax and trumpet. There's not much in jazz that is playable on the guitar but is not playable on either piano, sax or trumpet. Conversely, no guitar player has reached the profieciency of, say, a Chris Potter, or of a Keith Jarrett. Since we're getting most of our lines from the various Parkers and Coltranes, and our harmonies from the Ellingtons or Evans (Bill and Gil!) it really doesn't seem that important that we cannot play that specific voicing that Pat Martino played on that specific record (unless my goal is to play note-by-note transcriptions of jazz solos). I doubt there's a single Parker's line that is playable on the stardard tuning but not on the all-fourths (or the other way around). A differently tuned guitar is effectively a slightly different instrument, and arguing if a tuning is "better" than another one in a generic sense, is probably as silly as arguing if the trumpet is better than the piano. Both have their strong and weak points, and good artists used their strengths to their advantage.

Is this the final proof? No way. All systems are rich enough to play the common chords and inversions, and it's up to you to decide if the chords that become easier (or accessible) are more "valuable" to your music than the ones that become more difficult (or impossible). I think six-string chords are not very useful in jazz (at least not as simple triads, and "richer" version are available to the all-fourths tuning), but maybe you have a different opinion. Until you actually spend some time with these tunings you won't be able to decide which one is the best for you. But, being time a very limited resource, why should you even bother with this? Well, maybe you shouldn't. The only thing I can offer is that, from my personal experience, the benefits far outweigh the costs. It is so much easier to learn and play (what I want to play) with the all-fourths, that it is well worth the risk of trying.

So, why is the all-fourths so much easier to play? I see three main levels coming together in learning how to play jazz. As the saying goes "first learn your instrument, then learn your music, then forget all that shit and just play".

• instrument: somehow we must produce the sound. The mechanical part takes quite some time to develop, and great players usually have a great technique, but as scores of YouTube videos suggest fast monkeys don't necessarily play good music.
• music: in jazz this usually means understanding the harmony and playing the "right" notes over the chords at the right moment. This involves the internalisation of sounds we want to play, taking inspiration for the past masters, mastering the subtleties and complexities of the jazz language and being able listen and react in real-time to your band mates. It's a life long journey.
• "the rest": as with most arts form, jazz is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. But it's that 1% that makes it all valuable. In case you haven't read it I suggest you check out S. Nachmanovitch's Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art. Best book on the subject I've ever read. Keith Jarrett said: "Nachmanovitch tells it like it is in the most important book on improvisation I've yet seen"

I believe the regularity of the all-fourths tuning helps to efficiently learn the mechanics of the scales, arpeggios and patterns we need. Learning these mechanics involves essentially the focused repetition ("practice doesn't make perfect. Perfect practice does") of these finger patterns until they are transferred to some form of muscle memory. When this is done we simply need to think about what we want to play (often visualising it or "hearing" it) and our hands magically perform the needed task, synchronising the fretting fingers and the picking hand with remarkable precision. Since the goal is music playing and not finger dexterity per-se, we need to link the finger movements to the sounds we want to play. Non-uniform tunings (as the standard tuning) greatly multiply the number of physical patters that correspond to a given musical result. This is a common difficulty/opportunity that the guitar offers as most notes can be played in multiple strings, but the irregular tuning exacerbates the problem without giving much in return.

The guitar is quite a different beast to master than the piano or the saxophone. Most jazz "manuals" will tell you practice a given pattern (scale, arpeggio, chords, ...) in every tonality. This doesn't mean much on the guitar, since we can simply shift the pattern up one fret, et voilą, we have our "new" scale, without having really learned anything new. To really learn the pattern we usually have to practice the different "modes" or inversions. The guitar is "vertically trasparent" to the shapes we play. We can shift the fingers up the neck and the intervals won't change. Sax players hate us for this! But the guitar with the standard tuning is not horizontally transparent. We cannot simply shift the fingers up one string and expect that our major scale will stay a major scale. We have to adjust it, as in the following C major example.

3 e ... B ... G ... B C D ... F G A A ... C D E E ...

10 e ... B ... B C G ... F G A D ... C D E A ... E ...

5 e ... B C B ... F G A G ... C D E D ... A ... E ...

For this simple 3-note-per-string scale pattern we have three different shapes to practice and learn. This simply means that, compared to a system where the same "shape" can be translated to different strings, it will take longer to get to the same level of mechanical proficiency and that we will always have to "remember" (subconsciously at least) where we are and choose the patterns accordingly. The major scale is a simple enough example, and most players master this very quickly. But the task should be repeated, at least by "serious" students, for the all the modes of the most common scales, arpeggios, and patterns. This problem is also present for chords, where the most common voicings will have at least three different fingerings, etc ...

While improvising there is simply not enough time to "build" these patterns in real-time (stocking intervals over the root), and professional players have a vast amount of "pattern vocabulary" (chords, scales, arpeggios, sequences, common licks) that they can recall instantly. No time to think "what is the chord here with that root and that voice on top". Memorising these takes time for everybody, and we should probably try to do this as efficiently as possible.

With the all-fourths tuning the patterns can be translated vertically and horizontally. A basic major 7+ voicing will stay the same, regardless of where it's played. No need to know on what strings those notes are.

?	...		3
?	...		7+
?	...			5
?	...	R

We can reuse the already learned patterns (and bebop licks, and melodies) automatically all over the fretboard. Visually, once we've identified the "root" we simply play the pattern over it. The consistent link between the finger patterns and sounds will quickly reinforce the association, and visual shapes will quickly start to "play". You will be able to move your fingers on an "air guitar" and your brain will recall the sound of what you are "playing" (the same process happens with the standard tuning, but it simply takes a much longer time). Sax players know this very well, and when asked to sing a phrase they will often put their fingers on an invisible sax and recall the sound. The sax has a much stricter one-to-one link between sounds and fingerings, and they learn from the beginning to reinforce this link via constant exercise.

The great advantage of all-fourths, compared to other non-standard tunings, is that it is very similar to the standard one. If you know your scales and arpeggios in the first strings (E, A, D, G) you will be able to "extend" them to the other two strings. You are not learning anything new, you are simply removing an exception, and once you'll get them under your fingers you will never want to go back. Chords are a different problem, and you will probably have to relearn most of them. At the beginning it can be quite frustrating, but once you see how fast you can progress and how you can reuse the new chords all over the fretboard you will gain confidence. Of course the more you have to relearn, the more frustrating it is. Metheny and Rosenwinkel do play with different tunings, and I wonder how easy it is for them to manage the transition. I certainly cannot play with the standard tuning anymore. The most difficult thing to re-train the sight reading. It's a bit like learning cyrillic, where C is suddently an S. It can be very frustrating.

From my personal experience I can say that the all-fourths tuning really helped me with the mechanics of guitar playing (speed, accuracy, ...) and with the foundation of my musical tools (scales, arpeggios, chords voicings). I am not Rosenwinkel, but, given the time that I spent on the instrument, I am a much better player than I would have been if I stayed with the normal tuning.

Discovering Bergonzi and his methods was one of those rare moments when different parts simply click together and make sense. He is a true monster on the sax, and one of the champions of the Coltrane sound. His books especially volumes 1 and 2, lay out a systematic approach to pentatonic playing that is both simple and incredible versatile. For the main chord families (major, minor 7, dominant, altered, ...) he chooses basic pentatonics (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6 for the major chord) and explains how to build patterns on top of them. Patterns are built simply by walking through the scale by using steps and "skips". His notation uses arrows, but if U is a step up and D a step down we can for example have the following pattern: "U, U, U, DD". If we apply this to the C major pentatonic (C D E G A), starting from C we get: C (step up to) D (step up to) E (step up to) G (double step / skip down to) D (and we restart, step up to) E G A E G A ... He then presents more complex pentatonics and more complex patterns, but the idea stays the same. I've tried for quite some time to apply this to the guitar, since these were the kind of sounds I liked, heard in my head, and wanted to play. The exercise quickly became very frustrating since the "play in all the different tonalities" simply does not work on the guitar. Each pattern can be translated in so many different shapes on the fretboard that either you keep jumping to a position you know, or you spend years on the exercices, even for the basic forms. One night, listening to "A Love Supreme", I understood how the only way to tackle this was to move an all-fourths tuning. I did so the next day, and never looked back.

With this system we associate to each pentatonic five different fretboard patterns, depending on where the root falls. Let's take for example a dominant pentatonic: 1 2 3 5 b7. The patterns are

b7 1 3 5 1 2

5 7b 2 3 7b 1

3 5 1 2 5 7b

2 3 7b 1 3 5

1 2 5 7b 2 3

These shapes can be moved all over the fretboard (horizontally and vertically) without modifying their (relative) sound. Since a shape of this size contains the octave, it means that it contains all the 12 possible notes. This means that whatever dominant chord will come up next we can find its root inside this area and find the appropriate pentatonic almost without shifting our fretting hand. We always have the scale we need right under our fingers. The same concepts are indeed true even for the standard tuning, but to achieve such goal we would need to memorize three times as many shapes (each shape can have three forms, depending on what set of strings it falls).

After learning this I threw the whole chord/mode thinking (e.g. on a II-V-I play Dorian, Mixolydian, and Ionian) into the thrash can. It had never worked for me. It never corresponded to the sounds I wanted to hear, it doesn't correspond to how those sounds where historically created, and probably the players I listened to never thought about their music that way. Everything became more and more a sequence of pentatonics. Finally those Brecker's sounds made sense. And finally I could play them on the guitar.

Normal 7-note scales were replaced by pentatonics + passing tones. For example adding some passing tones to the above dominant pentatonic I could get the following

6	b7		1
3		4#	5
	1		2

that is a lydian dominant (or whatever name we want to use), without having to think about strange modes of the melodic minor scale. In addition, by targetting the pentatonic notes, the passing tones (4# and 6) really become passing tones, and not "just another note" of the 7-note scale. This added structure to my playing. To "noodling" effect was gone. Almost automatically I was getting interesting sounds, outlining the harmony, and became able to link one chord to the next without having to jump around the fretboard (more about this on the "Targetting" section). Bergonzi also shows "upper level" pentatonics (effectively equivalent to chord substitutions): the second level pentatonic of for a major chord is 7+ 2 3 5 6 (equivalent to the 1 2 3 5 6 pentatonic moved a fifth up). The possibilities become almost infinite, and having a structured way to practice this gives us an easy was to find new sounds instead of getting stuck with the same old patterns.

(todo. Hal Galper's Forward Motion)