Alternate Tunings

I play the guitar. Not like your uncle who takes his out 2 or 3 times a year, I play one of mine every day, and have for many years. I can honestly say that music has helped me retain my sanity on more than one occasion, and songs I have played for 35 years are like old friends, comfortable and familiar. But like every guitarist, I've reached plateaus and obstacles until I was wondering if I should quit playing. And then I'd get fired up again whenever I learned some new song or technique.

One of my favorite re-starters in this case is alternate tunings. Some songs are borderline impossible to play in standard tuning, and anyway, artists like Stephen Stills and Joni Mitchell have written entire libraries of songs in alternate tuning. They're tricky enough to play in these different tunings and frankly mind-boggling in standard tuning "translations".

For you non-guitarists or beginning axemen (or women - my wife plays too) alternate tunings mean any deviation from the standard EADGBE (from low to high) on a 6 string guitar. The most common is called Drop D and to get there, you tune that first and lowest E string down to a D an octave below the fourth string D. You get wonderful ringing D chords out of this and lots of great songs have been written in Drop D, including the Beatles "Blackbird" and "The Preacher, the teacher" by Yes. A further variation on this is a Double Drop D, where you also lower the high E string down to a D. And once you're there, if you just raise the B string up to an A, you'd have the most famous alternate tuning, DADGAD, probably just because it sounds cool to say it! There's some lovely songs in DADGAD by Led Zeppelin, Crosby Stills & Nash and others. Open C tuning is one of those that give you a nice ringing chord without any fretting. Jimmy Page liked this one too, as did Soundgarden, Bad Company and the Moody Blues.

I have some lessons using alternate tuning, all of which are on my previous post. I've also added a bunch of standard tuning lessons, including Annie's song, From the Beginning, Over the hills and far away, Friend of the Devil, Dun Ringill, Sandman, Old Tennessee, Desperado, The Wedding song, and others. These are not polished performance pieces; these are more like sitting down with a buddy who shows you how to play the song. Rough but hopefully effective.

So alternate tunings are great. It's a shame we can't have alternate tunings for reality, like accessing one of these parallel worlds the cosmologists talk about, one where everything is just a little different, every flavor, every note just slightly altered. Hopefully somewhere some mad scientist is working on this!