Quartal Voicings

The "So What" voicing — five notes, four stacked fourths

Tertian harmony (chords in 3rds) tells the ear what function a chord serves: major, minor, dominant, resolving, suspended. Quartal harmony (chords in 4ths) doesn't. Stacked 4ths produce a sound that's open, ambiguous, and static — perfect for the modal jazz of the 1960s, when the music stopped cycling through changes and started floating on a single chord for sixteen bars at a time.

The classic shape is the "So What" voicing: four 4ths with a M3 on top (P4-P4-P4-M3 from bottom up). Five notes spanning a 10th. The LH plays the bottom two, the RH plays the top three. Each card here shows two positions of the voicing on the ii chord (Dorian mode) — the root-position voicing and the 9th-position voicing, transposed up one scale step. McCoy Tyner moved between these all night.

LH

Root + 4th (the bottom two stacked 4ths).

RH

♭7 + ♭3 + 5 (P4 + P4 + M3 above LH).

Dm Dorian

Gm Dorian

Cm Dorian

Fm Dorian

B♭m Dorian

E♭m Dorian

A♭m Dorian

C♯m Dorian

F♯m Dorian

Bm Dorian

Em Dorian

Am Dorian

The Daily Drill

Float, don't resolve

5 minPick one key. Play the root-position voicing, then the 9th-position voicing, slowly. Listen for the absence of any "need to resolve" — that's the modal quality.
8 minVamp on a single ii chord for sixteen bars at a time. Alternate the two voicings rhythmically. Pretend you're Herbie Hancock on the intro to Maiden Voyage.
4 minMove chromatically: play Dm quartal, then E♭m quartal, then Dm again. Hear how the planing-in-parallel quality keeps each voicing internally consistent.
3 minTry the 5-position quartal (start on the 5 of the chord) too — for Dm that's A-D-G-C-E. Now you have three positions of the same voicing climbing up the scale.

Why Dorian works so well

Dorian is rich in stacked-4ths positions: six of its seven scale tones can be the bottom of a perfect-4th stack without hitting a tritone. Only the ♭3 (F in D dorian — the 4 of the parent C major) breaks the pattern: the stack built on it, F–B–E, contains the parent scale's lone tritone, F–B. (Major has the same count, but Dorian's minor 3rd gives the voicings a darker colour that's the whole point of modal jazz.) When McCoy Tyner sat on a single Dorian chord for ten minutes, the quartal voicings gave him an inexhaustible vocabulary on that one chord.

Four-note chords say what they are. Five stacked fourths only say where you stand.

80 bpm

Sound