OPEN G
I wanted to split open G from the other open
tunings because—for a reason I’ll get to in a
moment—I find it more interesting than the
rest.
To begin though, if you want to hear what
Open G sounds like, go listen to Keith
Richards—because he’s the Open G master.
“Start Me Up,” “Honky Tonk Woman” and
“Brown Sugar” are all time-tested Open G
classics.
Like the other open tunings, it’s done by
tuning the guitar to create an open chord
when strummed without any fingers on the
fretboard. In this case, as you might expect,
the D-G-D-G-B-D combination equals an
open G chord.
But what makes open G tuning so
interesting—and sets Richards apart—is that
you can do it with only five strings.
In his autobiographical memoir, Life, he says
the following:
I found working with open tunings that there’s
a million places you don’t need
to put your fingers. The notes
are already there. You can leave
certain strings wide open. It’s
finding the spaces in between
that makes open tuning work.
D-G-D-G-B-D
TONE TALK //
In much the same way as I find Max Cavalera
and Jimmy Bower only using four strings
completely fascinating—which is another
topic altogether, I realize—I love the
innovative route Richards takes to make this
open tuning work for him. And I hope you
do, too.
SIDE NOTE:
A hidden advantage of open G is that—
whether you play it with five or six strings—
three of them are tuned the same way as
standard tuning, meaning that if you’re
looking for a bridge over to alternate tunings,
this might be a good one to start with.
“A lot of five-string playing came from when
Sears & Roebuck offered the Gibson guitar
in the very early ‘20s, really cheap. Before
that, the banjos were the biggest selling
instrument. Gibson put out this cheap, really
good guitar, and cats would tune it, since
they were nearly all banjo players, to a
five-string banjo tuning.
The beauty, the majesty of the five-string
open G tuning for an electric guitar is that
you’ve only got three notes—the other two
are repetitions of each other an octave
apart. It’s tuned G-D-G-B-D. Certain strings
run through the whole song, so you get a
drone going all the time, and because it’s
electric they reverberate. Only three notes,
but because of these different octaves, it
fills the whole gap between bass and top
notes with sound. It gives you this beautiful
resonance and ring.
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And if you’re working the right chord, you
can hear this other chord going on behind it,
which you’re actually not playing. It’s there. It
defies logic.”
Change Your Tuning, Change The Game
ALL THE REST
There are loads of ways to tune your guitar—
just ask Joni Mitchell. In a career spanning
nearly five decades, she’s released songs in
more than 50 different guitar tunings.
From more common varieties like open E
(which she used on “Big Yellow Taxi”) to
more innovative concepts like B-F#-B-E-A-E
(which she allegedly developed based on a
bird’s call and used for a haunting tune called
“The Magdalene Laundries”) she’s continually
shown that, when it comes to open tunings,
you can get as adventurous as you can
imagine.
Other quirky modern examples include
Coldplay’s “Yellow” that’s tuned in an E-A-B-
G-B-D# configuration and “Iris” by the Goo
Goo Dolls, which is tuned to B-D-D-D-D-D.
Similarly odd is Stephen Stills’—yes, the Stills
of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young acclaim—
usage of E-E-E-E-B-E tuning on several tracks
of the Déjà Vu album.
But, again, the sky is the limit when it
comes to open tunings. There are many
other varieties that I didn’t cover here and,
perhaps, some that you can discover all on
your own—even if it means taking strings off.
Get creative and see where it leads you.
ToneReport.com
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