Ralph Oliver Patt (5 December 1929 – 6 October 2010) was an American jazz guitarist who introduced major-thirds tuning.

He invented major-thirds tuning under the inspiration of first the atonal music of Arnold Schoenberg and second the jazz of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman.

[2] Following his 1955 discharge from the Army, Patt played with touring bands, for example, Neal Hefti, Frankie Carle, Les Elgart, Benny Goodman, Richard Maltby, and The Glenn Miller Orchestra.

[5] After touring for five years, Patt settled in New York City, where he worked as musician both at ABC and on Broadway from 1960 to 1970; during this period he regarded Barry Galbraith as his mentor.

[10][18] Luthier Saul Koll modified a sequence of guitars: a 1938 Gibson Cromwell, a Sears Silvertone, a c. 1922 Mango archtop, a 1951 Gibson L-50, and a 1932 Epiphone Broadway; for Koll's modifications, custom pickups accommodated Patt's wide necks and high G♯ (equivalently A♭);[18] custom pickups were manufactured by Seymour Duncan[18] and by Bill Lawrence.

Patt's website published his Vanilla book, which contains the chord progressions for four hundred jazz standards,[3][23] from "After you've gone" to "Zing!

[24] Living in New York City in the 1960s, he studied with Chuck Wayne, with whom he wrote The guitar appreggio dictionary (1965),[2][3][25] one of the bestselling titles from the music-publishing firm of Henry Adler.

Employed by the US Department of Energy, he specialized in groundwater contamination from nuclear waste; as a research hydrogeologist, he accepted assignments worldwide and had extensive travels in Ukraine and Russia.

[27] He was employed by Oregon's Department of Water Resources,[28][29][30] where he served as its expert on the risks to the Columbia River from the Hanford Site.

[28] 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.

[2] Having been diagnosed with kidney cancer in 2007,[3][33] Ralph Oliver Patt died at the age of 80 on 6 October 2010 in Canby[1][3] at home.