Many other blues masters have made great use of open A tuning on electric guitar in several of their songs, for both their slide playing and non-slide fingerpicked riffs. Open Aĭelta blues legend Robert Johnson played in open A tuning often, on songs like Cross Road Blues, Traveling Riverside Blues and Come on in My Kitchen, although, since some of his recordings were sped up in the mastering process (intentionally or not), his guitar may have actually been tuned down a half step on some of these songs, to open A flat (low to high, Eb Ab Eb Ab C Eb) or a whole step, to open G. Interestingly, Richards opted long ago to remove the sixth string from his open G-tuned Fender Telecaster and play his riffs on only five strings, with the lowest one, now the fifth string, tuned to G, always giving him the root note of the chord he’s playing, which allows him to strut and dance around on stage and perform his riffs live with almost reckless abandon, without ever having to worry about inadvertently sounding any unwanted sub-root notes.įIGURE 12 illustrates a few nice chord moves in open G tuning. This gives you a root-position major triad - 1-3-5 - across the top three strings and the fifth of the chord on the bottom, below the fifth-string root note. Like open D and open E tuning, open G offers a pleasing major-chord note stack across all six strings at any given fret, with a triad on the top three strings that likewise makes it great for both slide playing and chord riffing with notes added to the index-finger barre by the other fingers.īut open G has a distinctly different character than open D or E, due to its different voicing structure, with a low-to-high intervallic spelling of fifth, root, fifth, root, third, fifth. Probably the most celebrated example of a song in DADGAD tuning is the Led Zeppelin classic Kashmir, in which Jimmy Page made brilliant use of open strings in conjunction with shifting two-note fretted shapes, especially during the song’s signature descending sus4-3 chord riff heard between the verses, for which he simply moved alternating two-finger shapes down the fretboard to lower positions while incorporating ringing open strings as common tones in each voicing, as shown in FIGURE 6. The result is an ethereal and unresolved-sounding Dsus4 chord, with three open D notes in different octaves, two As and a G, the latter of which guitarists often use as their main melody-playing string in this tuning, with the other strings often serving as open-string drones and convenient same-fret octave shapes. Drop DĪ widely used tuning among masters of fingerstyle acoustic guitar, such as Pierre Bensusan, Phil Keaggy, Martin Simpson and Mike Dawes, DADGAD takes double drop-D a step further, by additionally lowering the guitar’s B string a whole step, to A (see FIGURE 5). But, again, like an accountant using a calculator, always finish the job with an electronic tuner, as playing out of tune is completely unacceptable to a listener in any situation, no matter how casual! 1. This issue is more common and acute with an electric guitar, with its less massive and thus more flexible neck joint, compared to that of an acoustic.Ī unison - a note doubled in the same octave - is the easiest reference pitch to tune to by ear, but an octave, perfect fifth or perfect fourth may also serve this purpose, if you’re experienced enough to know what to listen for.īeing able to tune by ear is a critical listening skill and an important part of your development as a guitarist and musician, and making an effort to do this on a daily basis is a very beneficial, ongoing exercise in ear training. Oftentimes, strings you haven’t even touched 'drift' slightly sharp or flat, due to the changing overall tension and pull on the neck that results from other strings being tightened or loosened. After you’ve made your best effort at tuning your strings by ear, use your electronic tuner to verify the accuracy of the results and to fine-tune as needed.

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