| Playing the Guitar: Alternate Tunings | |
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MODAL TUNINGS
One of the most popular alternate tunings is not an open major chord. It's called DADGAD - you may have heard of it. It was popularized by Pierre Bensusan. It's based on the open D tuning, but when you strum the open chord, you now get a suspended chord. This makes things interesting in a couple of ways. First, the suspended note keeps things off balance, creates a harmonic tension - you're never quite at rest.
Second, you've made the guitar into a modal instrument. What you've done is to take the F# out of the D chord. F# is the 3rd of the D chord triad. And the 3rd - the middle note of a triad - is what determines whether a chord is major or minor. Without it, the chord is neither - or both... creating a sense of ambiguity. You also end up with many repeating notes that don't have to be changed from chord to chord; they act as an effective drone.
There are close to an infinite number of alternate tunings that are possible with the guitar - some widely used, some tailored to a particular song, some simply outlandish (DDDDDD). I just saw a concert by a French classical guitarist who performed his "Homage to G#": one at a time over the course of the piece, he retunes each string to .... G# (with the lower tension on nylon classical guitar strings, it's easier to tune them up - for short periods of time).
Here's a site that includes alternate tunings used by 30 great contemporary
folk guitarists in well-known songs - from Joni, Dar and Ani to Michael Hedges
and David Wilcox:
http://www.museweb.com/ag/tunings/fm_tunings.html
LAST WORDS
Woody Guthrie once said somewhere "Anyone who uses more than two chords is just showing off." And you can trace a whole tradition of folk music that sticks to the basics. Woody, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs - they never had to retune their guitars out of their factory settings.
Joni Mitchell, on the other hand, had a field day with the harmonic possibilities offered by various tunings, and a lot of today's best acoustic songwriters have followed her. Many players use open tunings for the combination of openness and mystery they lend. To Western ears, these modal tunings with their drone notes also recall Eastern music and some writers use them as a handy shorthand for it, giving their music a "world music" flavor.
There are downsides to alternate tunings. You can end up with a droning sameness - any given tuning allows you to play easily in a limited number of keys. And though it may sound "Eastern" or "exotic," it's not authentic world music. Plus you have to retune a lot. You also have to remember which tuning to use for any given song - Ani DiFranco is so prolific and experiments with so many different tunings that I've seen her forget on more than one occasion - but she was good enough to improvise on the fly. So, have a care with this as with all techniques.
I myself hardly ever use alternate tunings. If you're a performer, you either have to carry more than one guitar or your guitar playing had better be spiffy enough to be worth the frequent waits while you retune between songs. For me, it just ain't worth it.
If you want to learn more about alternative tunings, our Guitar Guide Dan Cross has other tips and links and forum threads too.
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Hugh Blumenfeld, Editor
hugh@balladtree.com
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