Resonant Constellation

I’m always on the lookout for new material to help my guitar playing along. I consider myself a rank amateur on this instrument: I may have a decade of transferable (to one degree or another) skills on a LOT of other instruments, but each instrument has it’s own ticks and wierdness that must be worked out individually-you can’t apply a universal formula to playing all musical instruments. Guitar is a perfect example of this: when you first learn it, the strings are tuned in a very unnatural, brain twisting manner (at least to a classical cellist, which is what I was when I first picked up guitar). The best part of guitar, however, is that there is an enormous body of literature on alternate tunings for it. Learning and playing in these alternate tunings is challenging, but insanely fun.

My first foray outside of standard tuning was to Drop-D, a very common tuning in Irish music. Drop-D tunes the lowest string down one note from E to D (if standard tuning is EADGBe, Drop-D is DAdGBe), hence the “drop” title. I find that Drop-D is a great tuning for accompanying driving music, and can really get tunes going. The lower harmonies available really make good use of the guitar’s larger body (larger than, say, a fiddle or mandolin). Similar to Drop-D is Double-Drop-D, in which you drop the highest string (an e two octaves above the standard tuning lowest string) to a d two octaves above the already dropped low D. I find that this tuning is only minimally useful in the music I play, so I don’t use it all that much.

My short investigation of blues led me to learn the Drop-C# tuning, wherein all of the strings are dropped a half-step from the Drop-D tuning. If Drop-D utilizes the resonance of the guitar better than standard tuning, Drop-C# maxes out the guitar’s resonant capabilities. Some truly incredible sounding music can come out of this tuning, but also some weird buzzing artifacts can show up too. As it stands, I know about three blues tunes in Drop-C#. I would play it more, except that tuning all six of the strings back up again can be tedious and is sometimes hazardous (strings almost always break during tunings like these).

Currently, I’ve been keeping both of my guitars in Drop-D and dividing my time about 2 parts Drop-D and 1 part standard tuning. Today, however, I discovered a new tuning-DADGAD. It differs from Double-Drop-D by only one note, dropping the second highest “B” string to an “A.” Despite this seeming minor difference, this opens up incredible new melodic worlds. If you play guitar and you haven’t yet tried DADGAD, I highly recommend it. Take a look at this website: Han’s DADGAD Guitar Page.

I found this page today with only three hours to go before my usual weekly session, so I frantically scrambled to learn some chords and put together some progressions before I had to leave. The result, you will find below:

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I hope you’ll agree that it sounds pretty good for having picked it up three hours previously.