Keith Bromely Chord Book - Fourths Tuning
Published: 2024-07-21
tl;dr
I found a book of chords dedicated to fourths tuning by a guy named Keith Bromley. This book seems largely undiscovered by the community, and I found it immediately useful. Over time I will be writing more articles and creating better chord diagrams based on the chords in this book (and other chords of course). For now I just wanted to share a link to this useful resource and maybe brain dump a bit about chords in fourths.
Old video
If you prefer video format, I made a video about this topic here. Fair warning, though, it’s a bit rambly and I did not edit it in any way.
Chords in Fourths
There’s a really annoying misconception in the guitar world that Fourths tuning is somehow less versatile than standard tuning. This is simply not true. In fact, I would argue that Fourths tuning is actually more versatile than standard tuning, especially when it comes to chords.
One of the most annoying parts of this misconception is that somehow the idea “I can’t play my typical 5/6 string barre chord voicings in fourths tuning” gets translated to “You can’t play barre chords at all in fouths tuning.” This is simply not true. You can play barre chords in fourths tuning, you just have to learn new voicings.
This misconception is aided by the fact that prominent fourths tuning figures in the community often don’t focus on really teaching anything about the tuning. In fact they often try and push people away from the tuning, kind of spinning it as though “this is a weird decision I made for myself and I don’t recommend it to others.” Tom Quayle comes to mind especially here.
Alex Hutchings is one person that definitely does talk about the tuning, but his approach to chords (at least when he specifically talks about fourths tuning) comes off as entirely unconventional and non-idiomatic. At least to me.
The chord book from Keith Bromley that I linked at the beginning is a good place to start. I’ll be posting some more concrete information about chords/inversions/shapes/etc. soon. For now, I just wanted to get this out there.