Paul Wolfe: Hi, I am Paul Wolfe from How-To-Play-Bass.com. In this video, we are going to have quick look at Drop D tuning. Firstly, we are going to look at what is Drop D tuning. Then we are going to look at two ways that you can tune your bass to get Drop D tuning. So, what is Drop D tuning? Well, Drop D tuning is an alternative tuning method to the standard tuning of E, A, D and G that you are probably familiar with. Now there are hundreds of alternative tunings, but Drop D is probably the most common and this is what we are going to look at today. And you get Drop D tuning by detuning your E string a tone down to the note D. Now, some players use Drop D tuning in their playing include Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jeff Ament from Pearl Jam and Chris Wolstenholme from Muse, but there are tons of others.
The two methods I'm going show you to quickly detune your E string today to get Drop D tuning. When you detune your E string to Drop D tuning, what you are doing is you are going down a tone and a tone equals two frets. So when you are E string moves to D on your notes, the locations are effectively moved up two frets. So, A which is here with the fifth fret of the E string. When you in Drop D tuning and this E string tunes to D, A goes hit to the seventh fret.
So what you do you, you are going sound the open A string, then you can sound the fretted note at the seventh fret of the E string and obviously those two won't sound the same, but then what you are going to do is while you are keeping this note fretted with the left hand, you reach over with the right hand. So if you get that in, get into the tuning pegs and detune the tuning peg until the two nodes sound the same. So, that's what we are going to do. So, here is the open A string, hits the node to the seventh fret, here they are different. No, I think that's pretty close. There we go and then if I play the open string, you can hear that slower then the D and that should Drop D tuning.
Second method is going to be very similar to the first method, but instead of using the open A string and the note of the seventh fret of the E string, what we are going to do is when we sound the note at the twelfth fret of the E string, obviously when that string is tuned to E, that's the octave of E, which is the E, but by using the open D string and sounding that against this note here and then D tuning the string as we did before by reaching over, we are going to achieve Drop D tuning that way. So there is the open D string. You can hear that not right. It's slightly flat and again we have got our Drop D tuning that way.
A quick summary of what we have just looked out with Drop D tuning with two methods. Method one, we fret the E string at the seventh fret. Then you sound the open A String, then you detune the E string to the open A string, keeping that note to the seventh fret, press down. When the two strings sound the same, if you take your finger off the seventh fret and play the open string, you should now hear that it slower than your E string normally is and then you have to Drop D tuning.
Or there is method two, where we fret the E string this at the twelfth fret. The string that we sound to tune against this time is the open D string and then you D tune the E string, listening to the open D string sound and again if you take off when the two notes sound the same, if you defret the twelfth fret and play the open sting, you should be able to verify that, that is infact your E string D tuned down to the open D and there by giving you Drop D tuning.
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