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Open G


uncle fester

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More of a music thing but I just started playing with open tunings. Been doing it on my 3 string slide for a couple years, but never made the connection to the 6 string.

 

A couple take-aways...


  •  
  • I learned a lot on the 3 string to apply to the 6 string
  • Going from 3 to 6 strings is like 'BAM'!!! Power but needs to be used wisely, batman) - I can only imagine 12 strings!
  • Open tunings are phenomenal
  • Red Rooster sounds awesome, gets old quick
  • RL Burnside is difficult... very difficult, at 1/3 speed sounds hokey
  • Son house, lightning hopkins, and junior kimbrough are regulars on my Pandora channel
  • I aspire to put some old time raggedy blues together in the fashion of BK
  • Now I need at least one other guitar to keep open tuned

 

I really do feel like a kid in a candy shop! Thanks for letting me ramble. Anyone have thoughts on open tunings, or other things that mixed the guitar game up a bit?

 

Rgds - billroy

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More of a music thing but I just started playing with open tunings. Been doing it on my 3 string slide for a couple years, but never made the connection to the 6 string.

 

A couple take-aways...


  •  
  • I learned a lot on the 3 string to apply to the 6 string
  • Going from 3 to 6 strings is like 'BAM'!!! Power but needs to be used wisely, batman) - I can only imagine 12 strings!
  • Open tunings are phenomenal
  • Red Rooster sounds awesome, gets old quick
  • RL Burnside is difficult... very difficult, at 1/3 speed sounds hokey
  • Son house, lightning hopkins, and junior kimbrough are regulars on my Pandora channel
  • I aspire to put some old time raggedy blues together in the fashion of BK
  • Now I need at least one other guitar to keep open tuned

 

I really do feel like a kid in a candy shop! Thanks for letting me ramble. Anyone have thoughts on open tunings, or other things that mixed the guitar game up a bit?

 

Rgds - billroy

Open G and let the Keef songs rip.

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I bought my second guitar so I could leave one in standard tuning and the other in DADGAD (mostly).

There's lots of music around for DADGAD.

 

Definitely have to try that, maybe will need more than one more guitar... probably an LG something or other and a resonator :)

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More than a few us of us started off with Rollin & Tumblin and Little Red Rooster. Moved on from there to House's Death Letter Blues in Open G to Bukka White's Aberdeeen Mississippi Blues in Cross-Note tuning and so on. I do not play in open tunings hear as much as I used to other than on my lap steels. I think the last open tuning song I worked out was Alvin Youngblood Hart's Big Mama's Door. If I have a favorite though I would say it is Blind Blake's Chump Man Blues. Although Blake played it in Drop D, I have always played it in Open D. That is the way I taught it to myself, I like the sound and old habits die hard.

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I have an MIM Tele that fell victim to gravity at the store. I got it for quite a discount. One bad tuner and some dings, which was not an issue for me. I bought it for the sole purpose of turning it into keefocaster. All kinds of golden-era Stones songs on that thing. 5 string'er in open-G for 10+ years now. Lots of fun. I need a thicker neck, though. Arthritis gets me after 1/2 an hour on a good day with that one.

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The track I posted last week is in Open G tuning.... (my version of "Love In Vain" by Robert Johnson)........

 

 

 

 

 

I posted it again because it has some elements you could be interested in - in my travels in Open G land, one of the problems of retuning is that you never have enough Open G songs. So there are a couple of approaches to make it worth having a guitar in Open G full time. One is to convert all kinds of things you know to Open G. You could play the melody of songs you know by ear with the bottleneck....and then try to add some chords to fill it out. Ha! While the high E string is tuned down to D, in Open G the 2, 3, 4 strings are just like standard tuning, so you could experiment with using sections of the chords you already know from standard in Open G. Bingo, you can play a standard cowboy D7 and for now, leave out the 1 string, 5 and 6. So now you have a 5th chord to play with left fingers instead of that same old slide chord on the 7th fret..... In my track above I do this. I also add part of a standard A7 cowboy to D7. (in the first verse, it is the bit with "it's hard to tell, hard to tell"

 

So learn some chords and swap between playing slide and playing fingered notes..... [biggrin]

 

 

 

BluesKing777.

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The track I posted last week is in Open G tuning.... (my version of "Love In Vain" by Robert Johnson)........

 

 

 

Hey BK - it was you're posting of this song last week that got me to try open G :). Your influencing music halfway around the world my friend! Really appreciate being able to hear all you folks and maybe pick up a little something here and there.

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I have an MIM Tele that fell victim to gravity at the store. I got it for quite a discount. One bad tuner and some dings, which was not an issue for me. I bought it for the sole purpose of turning it into keefocaster. All kinds of golden-era Stones songs on that thing. 5 string'er in open-G for 10+ years now. Lots of fun. I need a thicker neck, though. Arthritis gets me after 1/2 an hour on a good day with that one.

 

Keef! Somebody once gave me a '67 "Smugglers" Tele which had already lost its electronics. I put a humbucker in the neck position and a Valco "strings through" pickup in the bridge so kind of a combination of a Keefcaster and a Coodercaster. These days though, the only Stones song in open tuning I play is "Prodigal Son." I cannot tell you how many times though folks used to ask me to show them "Brown Sugar" with a slide solo.

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One of the songs I still enjoy playing in Open G is Hot Tuna's Water Song. While we were not much for set lists, I used to often end the first set with this one and will still break it out when the living room turns into a picking parlor. It is one of those tunes that sounds a lot more complicated than it really is.

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One of the songs I still enjoy playing in Open G is Hot Tuna's Water Song. .

 

Wow - there's a lot going on in that song, could see a lot of fun and many parts needing to be represented in the pickin' parlor - including the guitar, a fiddle, a bass guy that looks Woodstock epitomized....

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It is also a lot of fun playing songs in open tuning that were not originally recorded as such. Songs like the Beatles "Things We Said Today" work really well in Open Gm tuning. Guys like Skip James were associated with Open Em - tunes such as "I'm So Glad" although James often tuned down a whole step

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I could never get the low string to sound right with open G

 

Prefer open E

In pre-guitar-knowledge days, I used to play a Candelas 12-string tuned to all Es and Bs. Not sure how I did it, and not sure what happened to that guitar. I was with an "experimental" group called Ba Ka Da, with crazy Tony Selvage.

 

I almost always play keyboards in the key of G.

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Remember how Keef described playing in Open G?

 

this one?

 

"The advantage (of the open-G tuning) is that you can get certain drone notes going. It's an open-G tuning, with the low E-string removed and there's really only three notes you use.

 

My favorite phrase about this style of playing is that all you need to play it is five strings, two notes, two fingers and one asshole."

 

- Keith Richards

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