What is M3 Guitar?

It is a system that promotes playing a guitar tuned in major thirds which means the strings are tuned in fourth fret all the way up. The m3guitar.com website has been online since 2001, and since then it has seen two major updates, and countless minor ones. Over the years it has consistently had of the order of 20 visitors per day but since I get close to zero feedback I have no idea what sort of impact, if any, it has had.

M3 Guitar V.1

In 2000 I had moved to Finland after 7 years in Southampton on the south coast of England. The M3 is the motorway that connects Southampton to London and the first version attempts to make fun analogies between jazz music and traffic. For example, speeding is fast playing, traffic jams are fast chord changes, and so on. The imaginative icons were made by Andy Ward, the brother of Simon Ward who studied at Southampton Uni at the same time as me. There are recordings of 7-string solo guitar for each section, and transcriptions for most sections. I had only just started to play in the major thirds tuning, and I spent many, many hours practicing during the 18 months it took to put the site together.

M3 Guitar V.2

Version 2 was published in 2007, and it was far more focused than version one. By that time I had come up with two important ways to improve my playing: 1) representing scales as symmetrical visual patterns, and 2) using a clock to visualize the 12 notes. In addition to hundreds of scale examples there was a section on accompaniment and one on solo guitar, including videos. Here is the advanced solo arrangement of Cantaloupe Island by Herbie Hancock.

 

M3 Guitar V.3

In version 3 I went back to 6-string guitars. The two main reasons were, 1) I have short fingers and I have always struggled a bit with the wider fretboard on the 7-string, but more importantly 2) I was fed up with the limited selection of 7-string guitars. For ten years I didn’t play a strat. So I redesigned all the exercises, updated all the diagrams, and added even more examples. The latest addition is intervallic 12-tone rows which provides a new way to play outside sounds. The site now contains 1000+ examples with audio and transcriptions.