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Ralph Oliver Patt (5 December 1929 – 6 October 2010) was an American jazz guitarist who introduced major-thirds tuning. Patt's tuning simplified the learning of the fretboard and guitar chord by beginners and improvisation by advanced guitarists. He invented major-thirds tuning under the inspiration of first the atonal music of Arnold Schoenberg and second the free jazz of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman.
He graduated with a degree in geology from the University of Pittsburgh. After his career as a guitarist, he worked as a geologist and as a hydrologist, often consulting on projects related to the U.S. Department of Energy.
After touring for five years, Patt settled in New York City, where he worked as musician both at ABC and on Broadway musical from 1960 to 1970; during this period he regarded Barry Galbraith as his mentor. He studied under George Russell, whose (1959) Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization Patt edited."My grateful acknowledgement to ... Ralph Patt for his valuable assistance in the preparation of the manuscript", wrote .
Patt recorded "For George Russell" in 2002: * Patt also studied with Gunther Schuller, who himself was a student of Arnold Schoenberg and who used Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique for atonal music. Patt wanted to be able to play and then to improvise twelve-tone music.
Major-thirds tuning packs the chromatic scale (the consecutive twelve notes of the octave) onto four consecutive frets of three consecutive strings, an arrangement that reduces the extensions of the little and index fingers ("hand stretching"). major chord and are played on two successive frets, and so require only two fingers; other chords—second chord, fourth chord, seventh chord, and ninth chord—are played on three successive frets. For each regular tuning, chord patterns may be moved around the fretboard, a property that simplifies beginners' learning of chords and that simplifies advanced players' improvisation. In contrast, chords cannot be shifted around the fretboard in the standard tuning E-A-D-G-B-E, which requires four chord shapes for the major chords; standard tuning has separate chord forms for chords having their root note on the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth strings.
Having exactly three for its open notes (for example {C,E,G}), each major-thirds tuning repeats every note in a higher octave, because guitars have six strings. Being regular, M3 tunings repeat each note after two strings: this repetition simplifies the learning of chords and improvisation. Chord inversion is especially simple in major-thirds tuning. Chords are inverted simply by raising one or two notes three strings. The raised notes are played with the same finger as the original notes.
Later, he purchased six-string archtop guitar hollow-body guitars that were then modified by luthiers to have wider necks, wider pickups, and eight strings. Patt's Gibson ES-150 was modified by Vincent "Jimmy" DiSerio, a luthier who worked in the firm of John D'Angelico, . Luthier Saul Koll modified a sequence of guitars: a 1938 Gibson Cromwell, a Sears Silvertone, a Mango archtop, a 1951 Gibson L-50, and a 1932 Epiphone Guitars Broadway; for Koll's modifications, custom pickups accommodated Patt's wide necks and high G (equivalently A); custom pickups were manufactured by Seymour Duncan and by Bill Lawrence.
Besides these guitars, Patt regularly played other stringed instruments as a recording musician: classical guitar, 12-string guitar, 6-string bass guitar, mandolin, banjo, and oud. Patt stated that "the only guys that didn't have to double on dates were the Tony Mottolas and the Johnny Smiths"; Tony Mottola and Johnny Smith were famous jazz guitarists,
and "doubling" refers to a musician's switching from one instrument to another, particularly within a family of instruments.:
(2026). 9780071318280, McGraw-Hill. ISBN 9780071318280 Patt worked primarily as a studio musician from 1970 to 1975.
His website followed earlier contributions to guitar scholarship and instruction. In 1962, Patt wrote his Guitar chord dictionary (1962). Living in New York City in the 1960s, he studied with Chuck Wayne, with whom he wrote The guitar appreggio dictionary (1965), one of the bestselling titles from the music-publishing firm of Henry Adler.
He was employed by Oregon's Department of Water Resources, where he served as its expert on the risks to the Columbia River from the Hanford Site. As a hydrological geologist (hydrologist), he was appointed to a panel of outside experts that reviewed and then "slammed" the U.S. Department of Energy's report on the safety of the underground storage of high-level nuclear waste at Hanford.
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