Alternate Tunings

[Light]

Pretty much what Light said. Open tunings are fun, but if you "need" more than one tuning to get new sounds out of a guitar, than you're probably being lazy in your standard tuning

to reply to Light, i agree 100% that it is a pain to retune all the time and taking 20 guitars to a show is porblematic. however, i assure you i dont do it out of laziness

Hold up now, I never said anything about LAZY. In fact, I said something rather negative about people who think it's lazy. I just said alternate tunings weren't a MUST. Hell, at least part of my reason for not using them is that I'm lazy. Plus, many of my favorite guitar players use them all the time. Joni Mitchell, of course, but Pat Metheny used to use them a lot, and Leo Kottke also used to use them a lot. Though, in the case of Metheny and Leo, they have both moved away from them in the last 20 years or so. Alternate tunings are cool, just not a MUST.


Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi

 

[Chili]

If you haven't done so already, you might check out slack key music on the Dancing Cat label. A variety of artists and they typically provide the tuning for each song.

Cool, thank you... I will check it out.

 

[DrewPeterson7]

Hold up now, I never said anything about LAZY. In fact, I said something rather negative about people who think it's lazy. I just said alternate tunings weren't a MUST. Hell, at least part of my reason for not using them is that I'm lazy. Plus, many of my favorite guitar players use them all the time. Joni Mitchell, of course, but Pat Metheny used to use them a lot, and Leo Kottke also used to use them a lot. Though, in the case of Metheny and Leo, they have both moved away from them in the last 20 years or so. Alternate tunings are cool, just not a MUST.


Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi

Haha, sorry Light - I didn't make that as clear as I could have, but the "lazy" bit was purely me.

In context, I should expand a bit - I guess what I was trying to say is if you "need" open tunings, and then just use them to play the basic, fundamental chord forms that come easily, and not push them any further, then I think that's absolutely being lazy. It's a matter of using a tuning to do something that would be just as possible with a little more thought or practice in standard...

But, at the same time, there are guys out there (off the top of my head, Leo Kottke is a spectacular example, as would be Michael Hedges) who play in a wide number of tunings, but do some pretty spectacular things in those tunings. I don't think anyone would call them "lazy."

I guess what I was trying to say, and evidently failed to p) was that to me, the number or nature of the tuning(s) you play in has very little to do with whether or not you're a lazy player. A guy playing power chords and stock canned licks based on the pentatonic scale in standard is probably going to be called "lazy" not because he's playing in standard tuning, but because he's doing very rudimentary things in the tuning he's chosen. THAT was what I was trying to say...

EDIT - ok, just realized you'd mentioned Kottke too. That's what happens when you start replying, a colleague swings by to see if you want to go out to lunch, and you finish an hour later when you get back. Anyway, he's a monster, isn't he? One of the funniest performers I've ever seen, to boot.

 

[mshilarious]

The obvious solution is that Gibson robot guitar

 

[Armistice]

I find you can also do more interesting things with 12/9/7/5 fret harmonics with open tunings as they more naturally fall into the chord which you've based your tune around..

Suggest Tea Party "The Badger" from their second album as a prime example... DADF#AD tuning...

 

[DrewPeterson7]

Suggest Tea Party "The Badger" from their second album as a prime example... DADF#AD tuning...

GREAT band.

 

[ofajen]

As a guitarist who uses folk and soft acoustic balads as one of my major styles of playing, ive found alternate tunings to be a must. when its just your voice and your guitar, you gotta get a tuning to give you a fuller sound, and sometimes to even cover up chord progressions that are easily identifiable with bare instrumentation.
im partial to DADADD, DADGAD, CGCGBE, EAC#EBE and DADGBD. i like these becuase you can easily obtain a beautiful rich sound out of them.
Im looking for many more, since there is only so much you can do with a few alternate tunings, and if anyone has any suggestions, i would love to hear them.

Actually, if I look back at what I've composed and recorded using guitar over the last 25 years or so, the EADGBE "standard" tuning is more of an "alternate" tuning for me, other than the first few years I started playing guitar.

A few years in (1985), I started playing The Stick@, which now has a multitude of possible tunings, but the standard 10-string tuning back in the mid-80s was melody in 4ths and bass in 5ths, both moving up from center to the edges, so there is a reciprocal octave relationship between the two as you move across strings. So, in the late 80s and 90s, I tried to keep some consistency between the straight fourths melody tuning of The Stick and my guitar tuning. I chose to play guitar mostly in straight 4ths (EADGCF), which is great for melody work and rhythm on most of my jazz tunes, though not good for big, 6-string major or minor triads.

This decade I've played more a using the CGDAEG tuning, which is a mostly 5ths-based tuning that is generally known as the "Crafty" tuning because it is used by Robert Fripp and his League of Crafty Guitarists.

However, I've been playing The Stick more lately and moving back to 4ths-based guitar tunings: straight 4ths, the "standard" tuning and straight 4ths with a dropped low D.

Cheers,

Otto

 

[Supercreep]

Chords played in alternate tunings sound different than the same chords in standard tuning.

Just like picking up a new instrument, songs suggest themselves when you are hearing something "new".

So while alternate tunings are not a "must", either is having all six strings on your guitar.