Over a 25 years years I’ve experimented with a lot of open tunings. originally I was inspired to do this after hearing John Martyn, John Renbourn, Stefan Grossman and then a few years after that, Michael Hedges, Pierre Bensusan, Alex de Grassi and of course Nick Drake.
Finding material to play in normal tuning is easy these days, but getting a good range of tunes is not so easy in some of the other tunings. what I’ve had to do over the years is create my tunes or rejig other tunes to suit.
A few weeks back , I was listening to an album by Anouar Brahem, the Oud player from Tunisia and the Norwegian sax player and I decided to arrange a piece of music in a version of C tuning, it’s C G C G C F from bass to treble. you’ll finfd the TAB and music notation at http://the-guitarplayer.com/?p=72 it’s very simple and short but a great piece to work with.
4 Comments
December 9, 2007 at 12:17 pm
The C tuning is nice but the lows do tend to buzz a bit.
On my Taylor, anyway.
I’ve always been a big fan of DADGAD.
I could mess with that tuning for hours.
Cool blog. I’ll be back.
~m
December 11, 2007 at 7:26 pm
M
Try taking the guitar up a semi-tone, it may handle it
You’d then have
C# G# C# G# C# F#
It may feel a bit weird at first because of the B and E going up higher, but if you were using it regularly you could use a lighter and E. The whole thing with opentuning is to see it as a new instrument and changing the thinking a little.
Tony
May 16, 2009 at 4:40 pm
FACFCF?
I like your blog quite a bit.
Don’t know if you’ve seen this, but Erik Mongrain appears to be in-line with your postings/worthy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bb9cidk0Bfs
July 13, 2009 at 11:48 am
Thanks Will
I would use CGCGCE or CGCGCF or for Cminor CGCGCEflat depending what I want to achieve