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Just curious, what tunings are your guitars setup to/what tunings do you commonly use?
I am in D standard currently - i feel that E is a little too bright for what i am doing. I sometimes drop the low D to C.
Used to ´look down´ on drop tunings as they gave me an impression that it is but an easy/lazy way out to make powerchords even easier to play , but i´ve discovered that it opens up a whole new sound world.
In fact, it would be great to have one guitar for every possible ´standard´ tuning (all the way from E, Eb, D, C#, C till A even!).
Open strings in different pitches really do make things sound very very different/fresh.
I´m not as intrigued by open tunings as of yet though. |
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One of my acoustic guitars is usually tuned to an open D Major chord. I like this tuning its easy and a lot of fun to play with. (D-A-D-F#-A-D)
All my other guitars are tuned to standard tunings. Since I play to a lot of BG tracks having my main guitars tuned this way makes sense. About half of my guitars are currently tuned a half step down because they naturally tend to go into that tuning and they don´t get played that much so that is where they stay until I notice and tune them up again.
When I want to have a darker tone I use my 7 string. The low B is plenty dark for my taste. |
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I tune all of my guitars to D# (half-step down from concert pitch). The reason for that is ´cause I play a lot of Slayer and Hendrix/Vaughan stuff. I just acclimated to that tuning from playing all that stuff from those dudes. Now I prefer that tuning.
I sometimes drop the low string to C#. That´s about it. I don´t mess around with tunings all that much. I have over 20 guitars so I could easily set them up for different tunings if I wanted to but I never do. I just kinda roll with the D# tuning all the time.
The only other thing I do is drop the 5th string down to F# sometimes to get that "Open-G" sound without having to change the tuning of any of the other strings. Like, if I were to jam on a Stones song or something like that. You can get away with just dropping that one string and still get that sound for the most part. That´s a useful technique if you´re playing a show and you only got one guitar and you don´t have the time to re-tune and deal with the neck going outta whack. |
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| dude, I am in A#,F,A#,D#,G,C and I love it. |
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Just to throw my 2 cents in, I personally prefer to keep my guitar in standard E as much as I can. I do a lot of covers and most of these are in E. Obviously when I really have to I´ll de-tune the guitar for something but it´s not often that I do, certainly not enough to warrant setting the gutiar up in that tuning permanantly.
I also agree with Tommy Emmanuel, he has forever said that he likes to keep his guitars in standard concert pitch, with the occasional drop D tune, because he doesn´t feel he knows that tuning enough to be able to start mucking around with other tunings. I don´t mean any disrespect to be people that do detune and try out crazy tunings, I enjoy listening to it and admire people that do it. However I personally would like to know a lot more about standard tuning before leaping around with others. |
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| I have a related topic to discuss, kinda tangential I guess but... do any of you dudes who play along to other people´s music ever bust a track open in Audacity or some other DAW and change the tuning of the track to your liking? I´ve been doing this for a long time. Like, I´m really into the D# tuning like I said so I´ll take a bunch of songs from different artists and I´ll just tune the tracks to D# so I don´t hafta change the tuning of my guitar. It´s pretty cool. |
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Yes, i used to do that all the time when i was stuck with E standard and learning alot of D standard stuff.
Even now I still alter song keys fairly often (esp the B standard and baritone range)
I use a plugin called ´Pacemaker´ on Winamp. It allows ´real time´ ´transposition´ of songs |
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| Cool. I used to use Winamp back in the day. I think that was the first platform that used to work with and manipulate tracks. |
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| Not totally on topic but I think the main reason why I started to tune down whole step after whole step until I ended up in A# was because my voice is fairly deep and when I sing it is very limiting to be in E standard. I don´t know if this is common but I assume so. |
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