Ok, something I've never done much with - open tunings, what

[littlegreenman]

You know, outside of standard tuning, and drop D, I've really never used, or experimented with any open tunings, now, a good friend of mine is interested in them and I don't really understand them. *
What do you base the structure of an open tuning on? *How is it built, and why is it that way.
I've done some stuff with my guitar tuned weird, but I never concerned myself with what tuning it might have been.
So, could someone out there that is obviously smarter than me, please explain, it surely would be appreciated.
Jeremy

[Josh Blagg]

I don't think it is as clear cut as you want it to be. *An open tuning can be setup to do anything. *As far as I am concerned, there is really no rule or pattern you follow.

I think it all depends on the function of what you are doing. *For instance, if you are playing slide, you might want to make the open tuning resemble a chord shape that comes up at different places on the neck. *If you are playing a piece where you want to accentuate a certain note or notes as open strings, then you tune those notes to be available on your open tuning, etc.

Take Bad Horsie for example. *Big time hard sounding rock song, so Steve needed a power chord shape voiced root-fifth-octave. *Dropping the low string a whole step lower than it usually is in relation to the other strings created that voicing on the 3 low strings as an open tuning. *This way, he was able to use the slide to play the chord -- and like I said, the chord shape is used in different positions.

You can also alternate tune to play chord voicings that would otherwise be impossible in a standard tuning. *I don't think I need to tell you that the possibilities are endless on this one.

Sometimes my alternate tunings are for solo electric guitar...and by that I mean like a chord/melody piece. *Listen to some Chet Atkins songs where he plays the bass line and the melody simultaneously, or juggles back and forth between them. *If you are chunking away at open low strings while playing the lead part, you only have 2 or 3 notes to pick from. *If you retune these strings, you can do some different progressions with this type of song.

[littlegreenman]

Thanx Josh, that's basically what I figured, an open tuning is what you make it. *I was just wondering, I know there are some "textbook" open tunings, D and G for example, I was curious if these were derived from some chord structure, or if it was just someone's idea. *The only thing I wonder about, is if an open D tuning was say D, A, D, A, D, F#, don't you think that's going to be putting an awful lot of stress on your B string if you decide to do a bend? *I don't know, I'm just curious, I wouldn't even have brought it up probably except my friend wanted to know. *I thought I knew my theory fairly well, but obviously there is still tons to learn, (well, I realized that anyway)
Thanx again.
Jeremy

[jem7vwh]

open tunings are pretty much open to lots of interpretation, they are often created to allow easy use of slide, or just tuned to a chord so that when struck open, they sound like a chord and then any fretted notes only augment that sound.

a fun one to try:
D A D A C D

[Two hands31]

I'm a huge fan of a Canadian band called The Tea Party and they use a wide variety of tunings and have only 3 songs out of their 7 albums in standard tuning! *Here's a few that they use that I find are a lot of fun:

EBEEBE
EBEGBE
DADADE
CGCGCF (I'm aware that that's the last one down a tone)

Hope that helps! *They also have one where the bottom three strings are all Cs. *Two in unison (4th and 5th) and one down an octave (6th).

[LGMT]

Try this one. Is the same that Page uses on Rain Song
DGCGCD

or Kashmir try

DADGAD