Description
Up until this point everything we've explored has been in what's called standard tuning. But standard tuning really is quite weird when you think about it, imagine someone picking up a guitar for the first time and trying to make music with it. To me it seems unlikely that they would have tuned the strings like this. To me it seems much more likely that they would have tuned the strings to some kind of open chord that made the open strings sound nice and then proceeded from there.
I'm guessing that they would have found all the things that are easy to do in that particular open tuning, but eventually hit the limit. Because that's the thing with open tunings. They make certain, very specific things really easy and fun, but other very basic things extremely difficult. And that's why standard tuning was invented: because it's the tuning where most of the sounds and tools we most often need are the most accessible. It's an all-round workhorse tuning.
So that's also how we're going to approach the open tunings in this chapter. We're not trying to learn a whole new bunch of shapes and scale patterns in order to adapt what we already know from standard tuning. Instead we're going to come at each open tuning looking for those easily accessible things that a particular open tuning is perfect for. This is an almost endless well of inspiration and I'm sure you'll have a lot of fun with it as long as you don't fall into the trap of trying to adapt what you already know and thereby getting overwhelmed and frustrated. In this tutorial we'll start in the simple end of the spectrum and explore the extremely common drop D tuning as well as the lesser known double drop D, which is a ton of fun as well.
Lesson Info
