“You can visualise things much more easily”: Tom Quayle on why he tunes his guitar to perfect 4ths

Tom Quayle is no ordinary guitar player. A few minutes listening to him play his TQM series of Ibanez signature guitars tells us that the fusion maestro is super gifted, with a legato style as smooth as it gets.

But when we say he is no ordinary guitar player it’s not just his abilities; he also approaches the fretboard in a totally different way on account of him eschewing standard tuning in favour of perfect 4ths.

Speaking to American Musical Supply , he explains that he has been doing this from when he first started learning the guitar under the influence of a teacher who similarly preferred perfect 4th tuning to the standard EADGBE tuning that most of us are familiar with.

“He took me through that theory side of things, and he was the first person that I had ever heard who played the way I wanted to play, in person, in front of me,” says Quayle. “When we were younger, Stevie Vai , Joe Satriani , Allan Holdsworth, all of our influences were like Marvel Superheroes. As far as we were concerned, they didn’t really exist in real life! But here was a guy who was right in front of me – I could ask him questions – playing how I wanted to play.”

There are a couple of ways to tune your guitar to perfect 4ths. You could tune the bottom four strings down a half-step, or you could tune the top to strings up half a step to C and F respectively. What this does is make every interval between the strings a 4th, offering a more symmetrical fretboard to work with; it also makes a lot of conventional chord shapes redundant.

Quayle argues that this symmetry opens up new opportunities, making the fretboard easier to envisage. Back then, he had little to no fretboard knowledge. After tuning to perfect 4ths, learning the guitar that way, he realised that he was placed at an advantage when he studied for his degree in jazz guitar .

“With this tuning, it’s like a six-string bass. If you play a chord [plays Cmaj9], that chord shape, if you take it to the top four strings [DGCF in perfect 4ths], you would have to switch the shape to compensate for the fact that [the interval] between B and the E string is a major third. That B string is a weird kink in the tuning.”

Not so with perfect 4ths. Once you have learned the shape across the lower four strings it translates across the top four, because between all strings the interval is the same, a major 4th. Quayle demonstrates how this works by playing a simple minor third interval across two strings. They shape doesn’t change.

“That symmetry means you can visualise things much more easily on the instrument,” he argues.

Is it worth trying? Absolutely. The extra tension in the top two strings takes a little getting used to, but Quayle is right. The uniformity of intervals feels like a sort of cheat code for the fretboard.

But this tuning is not without its downsides. As Quayle says, things get complicated when someone hands you a list of covers to play.

Perfect 4ths can make playing repertoire more difficult, when you have to transpose classic licks – even easy blues guitar turnarounds – into this new shape. For a player like Quayle, however, that wasn’t a problem.

“I wanted someone to put a chord chart in front of me and it didn’t matter what it is I could play a solo over it, first go, and make the changes,” he says. “That was my goal at the time, and this tuning really helped to get towards that goal, and subsequently it has helped inform the vocabulary I have in my playing.”

That means he can take a simple arpeggio shape from one string and move it wherever he wanted. “You can move things in octaves in ways that you couldn’t with standard tuning, which is really, really useful,” he says.

The tuning doesn’t affect the music theory underpinning Quayles own compositions, or the lessons he teaches, or how to build legato techniques. It might occasionally confuse players looking at the shapes Quayle plays and wondering why it sounds different but that is symptomatic of how visual an experience guitar playing is.

Perfect 4ths might not be a magic bullet – definitely not if you’re playing Dave and Lisa’s wedding reception – but it is worth experimenting with, even if only for a fresh perspective.