One of my best friends taught me to play and I remember talking about weird tunings with him because Jimmy Page was his hero and I'd found a magazine article on how Page used just about every tuning in the book for various songs. Being a perverse bugger he often tracked guitars on unusual tunings over ones on standard tuning. Years later I got a book of tab for Steve Vai's Fire Garden and found he often does the same thing. Still this friend of mine kept saying 'I don't see the advantage of that personally.' Last I heard from him he's big on playing acoustic folk music. I bet he sees the advantage now.

Folk guitarists are renowned for this, some of them I'd wager have never even played a guitar tuned to EADGBE and may not even know how. I'd been aware of alternative tunings for years and never bothered with them until I went to see Martin Simpson live and started to see what you could get from using them, and why I'd never quite figured out how his music worked when I sat there trying to get it on standard tunings.

Capos are often an accessory to open tunings, because once you've got an open major chord, to change key you just move the capo to whichever fret corresponds to your preferred key. Keith Richards likes this idea on the records in the middle of the Stones' discography, and at one point even played the guitar as a five-string with the low E removed because it wasn't of any use to him. Just as an example, anyone who's tabbed 'Start me Up' should have done it in open G tuning. In his book, the man himself says it won't work otherwise yet so many bands try playing it in standard tuning.

If you want a great alternative tuning song to have a go at try 'Dyin' Day' by Steve Vai, where the electric lead is played on standard tuning but the acoustic that backs it is played in open c#major with fingerings that look like they belong on standard tuning, which is just NUTS. They key changes he uses in that song I still can't figure out musically, and it's a perfect example of how I'm never quite sure how people understand when they need to use alternative tunings. Guess it's just a matter of being used to them.