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Nerd mode opens every filter we've built — bass-note targeting, near-fret search, included/excluded chord tones, rootless toggling, plus the experimental Quartal and Quintal families. Same dictionary, sliced as finely as you want it.

The V-System

A complete map of every 4-note jazz voicing on the guitar.

The short version

If you've ever played a Drop 2 chord, you've already used the V-System without knowing it. Drop 2 is one of fourteen possible 4-note voicing structures. The V-System is the bigger picture — a way of naming, finding, and using every single one of them, including the dozen most books skip over.

Think of it as a vocabulary. Once a voicing has a name, you can ask for it, transpose it, hear how it differs from its neighbours, and use it on purpose.

Warm-up — three things to have in your head

The four chord tones

A 7th chord has exactly four distinct notes. We label them by position in the chord:

1 — root
3 — the third
5 — the fifth
7 — the seventh

Cmaj7, for example, is C (1), E (3), G (5), B (7).

The four voices in the chord

Stack the four notes lowest to highest and each spot earns a name borrowed from choirs:

Bass — lowest note
Tenor — second-lowest
Alto — second-highest
Soprano — highest

One chord tone per voice. Four voices, four notes.

Chord tones loop

Stack chord tones upward forever and they cycle: 1 → 3 → 5 → 7 → 1 (an octave up) → 3 → 5 → 7 → … That looping is what makes everything below work.

How the system works

Take any voicing. Read it low to high. Between each pair of voices, ask one question: how many chord tones did you skip to get there?

That's three counts in total:

Bass → Tenor
Tenor → Alto
Alto → Soprano

Those three skip-counts are the voicing's fingerprint. Every V-System has its own unique triplet.

What each skip-count means

Skip	What it means in plain words
0	Take the very next chord tone — don't skip any
1	Skip one, take the one after
2	Skip two
4	Skip four — that's a full loop, back to the same note an octave up
5, 6	Octave-up versions of skips 1 and 2

See it in action — V-1, "Close voicing"

Play Cmaj7 close: C – E – G – B bottom to top.

C → E: next chord tone, no skip → 0
E → G: next one → 0
G → B: still next → 0

All zeros. That's V-1 (0, 0, 0) — the definition of close voicing.

Compare to V-2 — "Drop 2"

The most-used jazz comping voicing. Take V-1 (C, E, G, B) and drop the second-from-top voice (G) down an octave. From low to high you now have C – G – B – E↑.

C → G: you skipped E → 1
G → B: next one up → 0
B → E↑: you skipped the C-an-octave-up → 1

That's V-2 (1, 0, 1). Every Drop 2 voicing — in every key, every inversion, on every string set — has the same fingerprint.

All fourteen, at a glance

V	Fingerprint	Familiar name
V-1	0, 0, 0	Close
V-2	1, 0, 1	Drop 2
V-3	0, 1, 2	Drop 3
V-4	2, 1, 0	Drop 2 & 3
V-5	1, 2, 1	Drop 2 & 4
V-6	4, 0, 0	—
V-7	5, 0, 1	—
V-8	2, 2, 2	—
V-9	1, 0, 5	—
V-10	1, 4, 1	—
V-11	2, 1, 4	—
V-12	4, 1, 2	—
V-13	0, 4, 0	—
V-14	0, 0, 4	—

Most books only teach V-1 through V-5. V-6 onwards are the wide, open, sprawling voicings — full of air and movement. They live in modern jazz comping, harp-style chord-melody, and any context where you want sound to stretch across the neck.

Why exactly fourteen?

Try every possible skip-count combo and you might expect dozens. But four rules knock out the duplicates and impossibilities, leaving exactly 14 unique structures. Each rule traces back to one core idea: a V-System voicing never doubles a note. Four different chord tones in every chord, always.

Rule 1 — Skipping 3 puts you back where you started

The chord-tone cycle has 4 notes. Skip 3 of them and you've gone all the way around — landing on the same letter you started with, just an octave higher. That's a doubled note, and the V-System doesn't allow doublings.

Try it

Start at C in Cmaj7. Skip 3 chord tones (E, G, B). The next one is… C again. Same letter.

That's why a skip of 3 never appears. A skip of 7 has the same problem one octave further on.

Rule 2 — Skipping 4 is "same note, one octave up"

Because the cycle has 4 notes, a skip of 4 returns you to the chord tone you started from — just higher up. So:

4 behaves like 0 + an octave
5 behaves like 1 + an octave
6 behaves like 2 + an octave

These bigger numbers are still valid — they just tell you the voices sit far apart. V-6 starts with a skip of 4, and that wide opening is exactly what gives V-6 its airy, spacious sound.

Rule 3 — Two skips in a row can't add up to 2 or 6

This rule stops the alto voice from accidentally landing on a doubled note.

Why

If Bass→Tenor is 1 and Tenor→Alto is 1, the total skip from Bass all the way up to Alto is 1+1+1 = 3 chord tones. And we just saw what skipping 3 does — same letter, doubled note.

Sums of 6 cause the same doubling, one octave wider apart.

Rule 4 — All three skips can't sum to 1, 5, or 9

This rule stops the soprano voice from doubling up. Add all three of your skips. If the total is 1, 5, or 9, the soprano has wrapped around the cycle and landed on the same chord tone as the bass.

Apply all four rules and exactly 14 structures survive. That's not arbitrary — it's the math of "four different chord tones spread across four voices, stacked low to high."

Inversions — same shape, different starting note

Each V-System has four flavours depending on which chord tone is in the bass:

Root position — bass is the 1
1st inversion — bass is the 3rd
2nd inversion — bass is the 5th
3rd inversion — bass is the 7th

The skip pattern doesn't change. A V-2 voicing has fingerprint (1, 0, 1) whether it's rooted at C, E, G, or B in Cmaj7. The shape on the neck moves around, but the structural DNA is invariant.

Mirror twins

Some V-Systems are mirror images of each other — reverse one's fingerprint and you get the other:

V-3 (0, 1, 2) ↔ V-4 (2, 1, 0)
V-6 (4, 0, 0) ↔ V-14 (0, 0, 4)
V-7 (5, 0, 1) ↔ V-9 (1, 0, 5)
V-11 (2, 1, 4) ↔ V-12 (4, 1, 2)

The others — V-1, V-2, V-5, V-8, V-10, V-13 — are their own mirror. Their fingerprints read the same forwards and backwards.

Mirrored pairs feel related but sit differently under the fingers — the wide gap moves between voices, which shifts which part of the chord rings out loudest.

Why bother learning this

Most method books teach Drop 2 and Drop 3 and stop there. Knowing the whole system gives you:

Vocabulary. You can ask for a specific texture instead of fishing around. "Cmaj7 in V-9" is a specific sound, every time.
Ears. Once you can name what you're hearing, you start hearing why it sounds the way it does.
Composition. Move between V-1 and V-7 for dramatic shifts. Stick with V-1 for tight voice leading. Reach for V-13 when you want something most listeners haven't heard.
The unfamiliar. V-6 through V-14 contain voicings most guitarists never play. That's also where the most striking, fresh sounds live.

The people behind it

Ted Greene (1946–2005) — legendary Los Angeles guitarist, composer, and teacher. The V-System came out of his lifelong study of guitar voicings.
Jim Hober — Greene's student. In 1999 he formalised the skip-counting method and put it on paper, turning Greene's mental framework into something the rest of us can learn.

Intervallic Voicings

Chords built by stacking 4ths or 5ths through a scale, instead of the usual 3rds.

The short version

Most jazz chords are stacks of 3rds — root, 3rd, 5th, 7th. Quartal voicings stack 4ths instead. Quintal voicings stack 5ths. Same idea, different interval. The sound is more open, more modern, less tied to traditional functional harmony.

Think McCoy Tyner's left hand on A Love Supreme, or Bill Frisell's washy, suspended chord beds. That's quartal territory. Quintal goes even wider — closer to bell tones or pedal-steel pads.

Warm-up — three things to have in your head

Diatonic stacking

"Diatonic" just means staying inside one scale. We don't reach for chromatic notes. So when we stack 4ths in C Ionian (C major), we go through the scale, taking every 4th scale note:

C → F → B → E → A → D → G → C…

Notice the 4ths aren't all the same size. C→F is a perfect 4th (5 semitones), F→B is augmented (6 semitones). That's fine — we follow the scale, not a fixed interval. The scale supplies the colour.

One stack per scale degree

Build a stack starting on every scale degree and you get seven different chords from one scale. In C Ionian, the seven quartal stacks (3-note) are:

I — C, F, B
ii — D, G, C
iii — E, A, D
IV — F, B, E
V — G, C, F
vi — A, D, G
vii° — B, E, A

The dialog generates all seven for you, in any of 28 scales.

Stack size

You pick how many notes to stack: 3, 4, 5, or 6 (Quintal stops at 5 — six perfect 5ths is too wide to play). More notes = denser sound, harder to finger.

How to use the dialog

Step 1 — Pick a tonic

The Root row up top. This is the note your scale starts from. All seven generated chords will be diatonic to this root.

Step 2 — Pick Quartal or Quintal

Under the Intervallic group. Quartal = 4ths, Quintal = 5ths. The V-System row disappears (intervallic voicings don't use V-System fingerprints), and two new rows appear: Notes and Scale.

Step 3 — Pick a note count

3, 4, 5, or 6. Quintal hides "6 notes" — that combination won't fit under one hand.

Step 4 — Pick a scale

The 7×4 grid. Each row is a parent scale, each column is the mode index.

Row	Parent	Modes (1→7)
1	Major	Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, Locrian
2	Melodic Minor	Mel min, Dor ♭2, Lyd ♯5, Lyd ♭7, Mixo ♭6, Loc ♮2, Altered
3	Harmonic Minor	Harm min, Loc ♮6, Ion ♯5, Dor ♯4, Phryg dom, Lyd ♯2, Alt ♭♭7
4	Harmonic Major	Harm maj, Dor ♭5, Phryg ♭4, Lyd ♭3, Mixo ♭2, LydAug♯2, Loc ♭♭7

28 scales total. The cell hover-tip shows the full name.

Reading a card

Every card carries a compact title in the form:

A·iii4²

Decoded

A — the tonic you picked
· — a separator
iii — the Roman numeral telling you which scale degree this chord is built on. Case + symbols carry the chord quality:
- UPPERCASE = major or augmented (e.g. I, IV, V+)
- lowercase = minor or diminished (e.g. ii, vii°)
- ♭ / ♯ prefix when the scale's degree differs from major by a semitone (e.g. ♭III in Aeolian)
4 — quartal (a 4). Quintal cards show 5.
² — number of stacks above the bass. 3 notes = ², 4 notes = ³, 5 notes = ⁴, 6 notes = ⁵.

If the bass note isn't the chord's own root, a slash and the bass note are appended: A·iii4²/E.

Interval labels in the diagram

The dots in each chord card are labelled by their scale degree relative to the tonic you picked — not the chord's own root. So in A Ionian, an A on string 6 fret 5 always reads "1", an E always reads "5", a C♯ always reads "3", no matter which scale degree's chord we're showing.

This makes scanning the seven cards much easier — your eye learns to spot the same notes across different chord-functions.

The overview neck above the cards

Each string-set section starts with a horizontal fretboard showing every voicing in that group on a single neck. Lines connect the dots within each chord; colors alternate gray and light blue across voicings; the chord whose root sits in the bass gets an orange highlight when exactly one card meets that condition.

It's a quick way to see where the voicings live, how they're related, and how they move up the neck.

Inversions

Like any chord, each intervallic stack has multiple inversions — one per voice. A 3-note stack has 3 inversions; a 4-note stack has 4; a 5-note stack has 5.

Quartal sections group by string set → inversion → 7 scale-degrees. Quintal sections group by inversion → string set → 7 scale-degrees. The grouping just reflects which voicings sit together physically on the neck.

Playability

Some inversions span more than 5 frets. The dialog automatically tries to re-finger upper voices onto different strings (keeping the actual pitches identical) to shrink the span. Cards that needed re-fingering get a small asterisk next to the title; cards still wider than 6 frets are also marked.

The bass note's string is fixed — it determines where the voicing lives on the neck. Only upper voices can shift.

When to reach for these voicings

Modal comping. A single quartal stack can hint at the mode without nailing down the chord. Great over static or pedal-tone passages.
Suspended sounds. Quartals naturally avoid 3rds, so they sound suspended and ambiguous — perfect for not-quite-major, not-quite-minor moods.
Wide voicings. Quintals stretch even further. Use them sparingly for bell-like climaxes or to let the sound breathe.
Chord-melody. The seven scale-degree cards under one tonic make a ready-made palette for moving any melody note through diatonic chord changes.
Composition. Strings of quartal chords parallel up or down the scale are an instant modern sound — McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, Joe Henderson, Wayne Shorter all leaned on this.

A starter exercise

Pick A · Mixolydian · Quartal · 4 notes in the dialog. Play the seven voicings in a row across one string set, listening for the gentle hint of the mode without ever landing on the major 3rd. Then switch to Quintal and notice how the sound opens up.

Now try Altered (the 7th mode of melodic minor). Same exercise. Hear how every voicing feels like it wants to resolve — that's the sound of altered dominant tension built into the stacking.

A short history

Quartal harmony moved into jazz through McCoy Tyner's playing with John Coltrane in the early 1960s, and was codified in the chordal language by Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, and Wayne Shorter. On guitar, it lives most clearly in the playing of Pat Martino, Wes Montgomery's comping behind a piano-less rhythm section, Joe Pass's chord-melody, and Bill Frisell's washy modern textures.