Quartal Harmony consists in chords by fourths.These kind of structures are not major neither minor. The new sound is suspended, and started around 1870 with Wagner, then Debussy, Schoenberg, Stravisnky, and the master of Quartal Harmony: Bela Bartok.

In Jazz , piano players McCoy Tyner first, then Herbie Hancock explored and innovated with this stuff a lot.Ambiguety and plurality are two adjectives that are effective over quartal structures. Coltrane and Shorter composed a lot of songs with melodies based on fourths.

Guitar has his Quartal Champion, he is the great Joe Diorio, with many books on this topic. Also Jim Hall used lot of quartal triads for comping.
Allan Holdsworth, Pat Metheny, Jonathan Kreisberg, Frank Gambale and many others embrace quartal music.

In this video lesson we will cover Quartal theory, triads, tetrads, inversions, drop 2, quintal chords, and how to use this material over modal and tonal music.  Also, we will talk about not only major scale, also melodic and harmonic minor, and harmonic major.

For me, it is a mandatory subject, and when you can use it with fluidity, you will begin to sound contemporary, not only for comping, if not also for composition and chord melody.

Juampy Juarez
March 2022

“There are plenty of guitarists that are happy to play what they are already comfortable with, keep it smooth and easy; there are others that are looking to push the boundaries of their knowledge and have no fear of reaching. If you are one of the latter, like I am, then Juampy’s classes, especially this one, are for you. Getting away from traditional harmony and building ideas in 4ths and 5ths is not new, having been developed over the past 50 or so years, but it usually derives from piano and horn players. This class is strictly for, by, and about GUITAR. The ideas on unusual chords, such as Melodic Minor #5, are priceless.”

~ James S.

PDF Included: 32 Pages

Skill Level:
Intermediate

Duration:  62 Minutes