How to Play the Guitar in Drop D Tuning

Welcome to GuitarLessons.com, we’re going to be learning a Drop D Tuning in this lesson. So the first thing we need to do is tune in on our guitars down to drop D. Let me explain to you what that means real quick.

And this is our standard barre chord shape like an A right here. We’re going to make that easier to play by tuning our E string, our low E string down to a D, so where it’s an octave blow on our open D string.

[Demonstration]

So that’s the idea. Just tune your E string to an octave blow or open D string. And now if we have that chord shape we made a while ago, that regular A power chord shape, it’s simply finding out where we only have to have one finger tip to make that chord with. Instead of playing like this, you just lay your index finger or whatever finger you want across the bottom to your strings and play all through it at the same time. So it’s easier instead of shifting like this for really fast chord changes. So you can just play--

[Demonstration]

It’s a lot easier to manage fast chord changes like that. So we’re going to learn a little riff right here from one of my favorite bands. The song is Dogman by King’s X. and we’re just going to learn the main little riff right here. I’ll play it for you then I’ll going to show how to play it—

[Demonstration]

So your third finger is going to come up to the 7th fret and play your bottom three strings just like the power chord. Then your middle finger is going to come back to the 6th fret and play those three strings. Index finger will grab the 5th fret on the A string. Then your middle finger will grab the 6th fret on the low E string.

[Demonstration]

Back to the 1st fret with your index finger then you’re going to grab the 5th fret with your ring finger. Alter your strings then the index finger is going to grab the 3rd fret all through the strings. Back to the fifth, third, and finally open. So it’s a lot more efficiently to play heavy sound at barre chords like that

[Demonstration]

And you’re going to find that this tuning is used in a lot in heavy music. And if you hear a song that’s jumping around like crazy on stuff like that, like power chords sliding around and jumping really fast. They’re going to be using some kind of drop tuning like drop de-tuning.


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