Alternate Guitar Tunings: A Practical Guide

What an alternate tuning is actually buying you

Three things, and it helps to know which one you are after before you start turning pegs.

• Notes your hand cannot reach. A guitar in standard tuning cannot play a low D. Drop D can. Six strings and four usable fingers is a real constraint, and retuning is how you move it.
• Open strings that ring with the key. In standard tuning most open strings clash with most keys, so you spend effort muting them. Retune so the open strings belong to the key and they become free sustain. This is most of why fingerstyle players live in alternate tunings.
• A different set of easy shapes. Every tuning makes some things trivial and other things impossible. That constraint is generative: players write differently in DADGAD not because it is better but because their hands fall into different places.

And the cost is always the same one: your map stops working. Scale patterns, chord shapes and muscle memory are all built on standard tuning's intervals, and any tuning that changes those intervals invalidates them on the strings that moved.

Drop D: D A D G B E

Lower the sixth string a whole tone, from E to D. Nothing else moves, which is the whole appeal: the other five strings keep their relationships, so every shape you have ever learned still works as long as it does not use the low string.

What you get: a low D for riffs, and a one-finger power chord: barre the bottom three strings at any fret and you have a fifth. That single fact is responsible for an enormous amount of rock and metal, because it frees the fretting hand to move fast while the picking hand hammers the bottom strings.

Check you are there: the open sixth string should now sound an octave below your open fourth string. If they beat against each other, you are close but not there.

DADGAD: D A D G A D

Three strings move: the sixth E down to D, the second B down to A, the first E down to D. Strummed open it gives Dsus4, a chord with no third, so it is neither major nor minor and does not commit to either. That ambiguity is the point. It sits happily under modal melodies that a plain D major would fight with, which is why it took hold in Celtic and folk playing.

It also gives you three D strings and two A strings, so the tonic and the fifth are ringing somewhere no matter what your left hand is doing. Fingerstyle players use that as a permanent drone underneath the melody, the same principle as practicing against a drone, built into the instrument.

Fair warning: this is the tuning where your standard-tuning knowledge helps you least. Treat it as a new instrument and learn a few shapes from scratch rather than trying to translate.

Open G: D G D G B D

The sixth and first strings go E to D, and the fifth goes A to G. Strum the open strings and you get a G major chord, which means a single finger barred across any fret gives you a full major chord at that fret. That is the whole mechanic, and it is why open tunings dominate blues and slide playing: a slide cannot fret individual notes, so it needs a tuning where a straight bar is already a chord.

Open D: D A D F♯ A D

The slide tuning, and the darker sibling of open G. The sixth, third, second and first strings all move down. Open it gives you D major; barre any fret and you get that fret's major chord. Drop the F♯ to F and you have open D minor, which is a very small change for a very large mood swing.

Because four strings are slackened, open D benefits more than most from slightly heavier strings. Otherwise the third string in particular goes floppy and buzzes.

Half step down: E♭ A♭ D♭ G♭ B♭ E♭

Every string down one semitone. No interval changes, so every shape, scale and piece of muscle memory transfers exactly, it is standard tuning wearing a hat. What changes is tension and tone: the strings are slacker, easier to bend, and the whole instrument sounds a touch darker and fatter.

It exists mainly for two practical reasons. Singers get a lower key without learning new shapes, and enormous swathes of rock were recorded this way, so you need it to play along. Whole-step down (D G C F A D) is the same idea taken further, and needs heavier strings to stay playable.

Worth knowing: if you are only tuning down to match a recording, you are doing the expensive version of a cheap job. Shifting the recording's pitch takes a second and leaves your guitar alone. See changing the key of a video.

How to change tuning without regretting it

1. Know your target notes before you touch a peg. Halfway through DADGAD is a bad place to be guessing. Write them down, or keep the tuning reference open, or set your target tuning as a preset in Tempo Kit beforehand so you can view target frequencies and play drone reference tones as you work.
2. Move the strings that go down first. Releasing tension first keeps the total load on the neck from spiking while you work.
3. Go past and come back. When lowering a string, drop it slightly below the target and bring it up to pitch. Finishing on a rising turn keeps the string seated instead of leaving slack that slips the first time you play hard.
4. Retune everything, twice. Every string you move changes the neck tension and therefore every other string. One pass is never enough after a multi-string change.
5. Play something loud and retune again.The strings need to settle into the nut and bridge. Strum hard, bend a few notes, then check. This third pass is what separates “in tune” from “in tune in ninety seconds’ time”.
6. Going back to standard is the same job in reverse. Same rules, same three passes. Do not raise a string quickly. That is the direction that snaps them.

Tuning is not just a guitar problem

Alternate tunings feel exotic on guitar and are completely normal elsewhere: scordatura is centuries old on bowed instruments, the cello suite No. 5 asks for it, and a great many traditional instruments have no single “standard” at all. Any string instrunment can be tuned to a different tuning to explore sounds or make playing easier. If you play more than one thing, or are curious what a pipa or a bouzouki is tuned to, the tuning reference has every string of twenty-odd instruments with note, octave and frequency, and a piano to sound any of them from.

Pick one and live in it for a week

The mistake is treating alternate tunings as a menu to sample. Retuning for one song teaches you the song. Staying in a tuning for a week teaches you the tuning: which shapes fall under the hand, which open strings ring, what it wants to do. Start with drop D, because leaving is cheap. Then try DADGAD, and let it be strange for a few days before deciding.