Reimagine the All Fourths Guitar Fingerboard

We begin by comparing the layout of standard and all fourths tuning, presenting the fingerboard matrix used throughout the book, and making an honest assessment of whether all fourths suits you.

Here you are presented with three diatonic cycles and learn to locate any note or interval on demand.

Learn to play major, minor, diminished and augmented triads anywhere on the neck. Intervals and triads come up repeatedly, chapter after chapter. Not only are they at the origin of chord formation, they are an essential tool for navigating the guitar.

Straight to the point: you see the triads in action and learn how to form basic major and minor chords in any key.

A primer that prepares you to use the appropriate pentatonic scales when soloing over a tune, and to deal better with chord progressions. You will understand enharmonics, key signatures and transposition. By the end, the idea that a song has a key and can be transposed should be familiar.

The pentatonic scale is the most popular scale on the guitar. Here we use two approaches to the pentatonic pattern, a compact one and a fluid one. They can be played interchangeably anywhere on the neck.

Seventh chords are everywhere. We examine the formation of major, dominant, minor, half-diminished and diminished seventh chords. As in the basic chords chapter, it is not about listing hundreds of chords in a dictionary, but about using triads and their inversions to understand how seventh chords are formed.

As with the pentatonic scales, I show you interchangeable approaches to the same diatonic pattern.

Progressions lay out the foundation of scale degrees, harmonic functions and cadences, giving you the essential concepts and vocabulary for understanding harmony.

Take the progression where you want it to go. Here you learn to voice lead chord progressions seamlessly using triads and their inversions: progressions in fourths and fifths, ii–V–I, thirds and sixths, seconds and sevenths. I took the time to draw out the positions in detail, so this is the biggest chapter of them all.

This chapter complements the previous one by showing how pentatonic scales can be anchored to triads and their inversions. That lets you embellish triads and also use triad voice leading as a guide for playing the changes.

Moving on to advanced chord formation, you learn to use two simple diminished seventh chords to voice all inversions of major, minor, dominant, half-diminished and diminished seventh chords without resorting to a chord dictionary. Pat Martino would be proud of you.

To expand your harmonic vocabulary.

How to keep going once the book ends.