Harmonizing in fourths

Quartal harmony is the way of building chords with intervals of fourths instead of thirds, it's a nice way to modernize and enrich your jazz guitar playing. This post provides an easy exercise for a first approach of quartal playing that is to arpeggiate three-note chords built in fourths, starting on each step of a major scale.

As is the case in many lessons on the website, you'll find a short YouTube video and the link to download the PDF for free, a little further in this article.

Quartal harmony is a modern jazz harmony technique based on stacking notes in fourths instead of the traditional thirds. On guitar, quartal chords create open, ambiguous and sophisticated voicings that are especially useful for jazz comping, modal jazz and chordal improvisation.

In this lesson, you'll learn how to build quartal chords, play chords in fourths across the guitar neck, harmonize the major scale with quartal voicings, use inversions and four-note shapes, and apply the famous "So What" chord to jazz guitar comping.

Quartal harmony became an important part of modern jazz during the second half of the 20th century, with players such as McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Bill Evans and Mike Stern exploring the sound in different ways.

The examples below include guitar diagrams, chord shapes and practical applications so you can take these fourth-based voicings directly into your jazz guitar playing.