Back in April, I wrote a blog about how open tunings work. Cryptically I called it ‘Open Tunings, Part 1’ which very implies there should at the very least, be a Part 2. Here then is a quick recap of what I discussed in April, but in all honesty, you’d be better off going and reading it first, so here’s the link
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.
The Minor Problem
Skipping to the end of my first piece, I posed a question that this approach might cause an issue if the song you’re trying to play has any minor chords. Minor chords require you to drop the third note in the scale back a semitone (one fret) but if you’re playing all your chords with just one finger in a barre, how do you do it?
Well the answer is, quite simply, you tune the guitar to an open, minor chord, rather than a major one, because you can add a finger to a barre chord far more easily than you can take one away.
In the previous blog we discovered that this was how you could tune your guitar to ‘open D’
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)
Consider the change you make under normal tuning to change a ‘D major’ into a ‘D minor’ - the finger on the first string, second fret, goes back to the first fret. That would take the ‘F#’ note down to an ‘F’. So to change from major to minor, we need to change all the ‘F#’ notes to ‘F’ by tuning down a further semitone.
In our retune to get to ‘open D’ above, you can see that we’ve tuned the third string, the ‘G’ down a semitone to ‘F#’. To get to ‘open Dm’ tuning we need to go ahead and detune that string one more step, so that the ‘F#’ becomes an ‘F’... Voila! Play all the strings open now and you get ‘D minor (Dm)’ add a single finger to the third fret, you get ‘D major’ (which we generally just call, ‘D’).
This allows us to play both basic major and minor chords, which are the basis for any popular song, but in a completely different way to normal.
So you can see from these pictures you play a flat barre across all the strings to play a minor chord. Second fret = Em, third = Fm, fifth = Gm - refer back to the notewheel if you have to to work out where the sharps and flats are.
And then we add a finger onto the next fret on the third string to get the corresponding major chord. Give it a go! If you ever give slide guitar a proper go, these are the chord shapes which give you that effect, it sounds even better on an electric guitar with a bit of sustain.
Hoping this will open a few new doors for you, pun intended, obviously. :-)
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