Open tunings have been a part of my songwriting adventures recently, and in a recent blog I promised to demystify what they actually are. I’ve flirted with them many times over the years, but never really connected. I think the main reason for that is that I associated them with being part of slide guitar technique. I don’t play a lot of slide, and none of my friends really do either so there hasn’t been any real impetus for me to push much further. That could have been a mistake, but that in itself might prove to be a story for another day... let's set the scene first...
So what is it?
Basically, an open tuning is where the open strings of the guitar, (or indeed ukulele if you so wish) are actually tuned to a specific chord. Imagine just strumming all the strings and getting a meaningful, musical sound… and then all you had to do was lay your finger across all the strings on any fret you like to get another chord. If you struggle with remembering or playing complicated chord shapes, or you’re an absolute beginner, this might sound like a godsend. Maybe it is. Personally I think if that’s what you’re going to use it for it might ultimately be a bit limiting to your playing, but it’s an interesting exercise and you can get some exciting results.
How do I do it?
So what you need to do is identify the notes in the chord you want to play so that you can tune your strings to them. A small amount of theory is required here, in as much as you need to know what order musical notes come in. The number of people I meet who think that the order of musical notes is some kind of random, mystic secret is unbelievable. The notes 'A' through 'G' are actually alphabetical, the trick is remembering that sharps and flats occur between some notes, and not others.
Here are all the musical notes shown as a wheel. You’ll see there are twelve notes, seven regular notes 'A-G' and five pairs of sharps or flats that occur between some of the regular notes. You can see that 'A#' (A sharp) is the same as 'Bb' (B flat). We call those enharmonic equivalents. It’s just a fancy way of saying the two notes are the same, but that we call them different things in different circumstances. It doesn’t really matter for now. It’s a bit like saying 2pm is the same as 14:00 hours.
I’ve been talking about ‘Open D’ tuning in my other blogs. So if we work out what the notes are when we play a standard ‘D’ chord, we can work out what we need to tune our strings to.
For a normal ‘D major’ chord we don’t play the bass ‘E’ or ‘A’ strings..
We play an open ‘D’ string, so one of our notes is ‘D’.
We play the second fret of the ‘G’ string which is ‘A’ (count +2 on the wheel).
We play the third fret of the ‘B’ string, which is another ‘D’ (count +3 on the wheel).
And the second fret of the top ‘E’ string, which is ‘F#’ (count +2 on the wheel).
So our notes are ‘D’ ‘A’ and ‘F#’. Those notes in any order, and in any quantity constitute a ‘D major’ chord. So we want to tune our strings down by as little as possible to make each one hit one of those notes. The string tension on a guitar is set up to be pretty equal, so you don’t want to make some strings super slack compared to others, it’ll feel weird. You also want to avoid tightening strings if you can help it, because over tightening strings tends to lead to breakages.
This approach is important to remember, because theoretically you could tune your guitar to any chord, but if you follow these guidelines, you’ll find that some work better than others. ‘D’ is one of those that works well, because all the strings except the actual ‘D’ and ‘A’ strings are detuned by either one or two frets. So try tuning your guitar like this…
D (bass ‘E’ down two semitones)
A as standard
D as standard
F# (tune ‘G’ down one semitone)
A (tune ‘B’ down two semitones)
D (tune top ‘E’ down two semitones)
Now strum all the strings openly, and you’ve got a ‘D’ chord. Go back to the note wheel. If you bar all the strings on the first fret you get ‘D#’ (also ‘Eb’), second fret for ‘E’, third fret for ‘F’ (no note between ‘E’ and ‘F’ you see) etc, clockwise around the wheel. Twelve frets and you’re back to ‘D’ again.
Time to try it out...
Try it for a twelve bar blues… ‘D’ will have all the strings open, ‘G’ will be fifth fret and ‘A’ will be seventh fret.
D / G / D / D / G / G / D / D / A / G / D / D
Now try it in ‘C’ - ‘C’ is lower than ‘D’ so you’ll have to start high and work backwards.
‘C’ will be tenth fret, ‘F’ will be third, ‘G’ will be fifth again.
C / F / C / C / F / F / C / C / G / F / C / C
That’s it. That’s the absolute basics. You’ll already possibly see that using just the one chord shape, (albeit a straight finger) means that you’ve got to jump up and down the fretboard a bit. That’s of course one of the reasons why we normally use different chord shapes, so that we have the choice to play in one area of the neck only. An enquiring mind might wonder about minor chords… major chords are after all, only half the story. I’ll let you enjoy playing with this for now though.
Ukuleles
The easiest way you guys can have a really easy go at this would be to tune to ‘Open C’. The notes for a ‘C major’ chord are ‘C’, ‘E’ and ‘G’. As your ukulele is probably already tuned ‘GCEA’ you only need to detune your ‘A’ string to ‘G’ (2 semitones) and you’re in business.
When I come back to this topic in the future, we'll talk about those minor chords (if you haven't worked it out for yourself by then), and think about what other tunings might work. If you've got any questions or comments on this blog though, please let me know, and I'll make sure they get answered next time around. Cheers for now!
Did you know...
All the blogs that I write containing playing tips and ideas for the guitar and ukulele can be easily sifted out by clicking the 'Playing Tips' tab on the homepage? I get that you might not be interested in EVERYTHING I write about (lovely if you are though obviously) but these tabs are the best way to try and find articles about things you're most interested in....
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