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Hey! Welcome to guitarlessons.com. In this lesson, we’re going to be talking about open G tuning. Now, I was looking on the internet a couple months ago and every lesson that was coming up was about the Rolling Stones and that kind of a song. So what I did to give you something different is I took my acoustic, put it in open G tuning and came up with little riff for a little lick to show you what’s this tuning sounds like to see if you might like, it must have bit more and kind of come up with your own stuff.
Let me play in just standard tuning, so just like I’d show you. If you have a simple shape and you change your tuning on your guitar, it can sound totally different. Now, this is going to sound pretty bad in regular standard tuning, so I’m just preparing.
[Demonstration]
Sounds really stupid and bad, those are shapes you wouldn’t normally play with a regular standard tuning, so let’s drop our guitar into an open G tuning and you’re going to see how this sound can really be a really nice sound.
First all, we’re going to do, I’ll tell you the tuning for each string and then you go ahead and drop them. It’s going to be D, G, D, G, B, and then another D. So let’s take our low E string and tune it down to a D. It’s always good to tune up to a note to not just down. So go a little bit below it and then come up to that D.
The next note, you’re going to drop down a whole step as well. The A string is going to come down to a G [Demonstration].
The next thing is fine because it needs to be a D, and it’s already a D. The next string is also fine because it should be a G. Next string is fine because it use to be a B. And finally the high E string is going to come down to a D as well, one step lower [Demonstration].
Okay now, they were tuned to our open G, give all six strings a bit a bit stoned to us just to get an idea of what these tuning sounds like with our open strings.
Okay, now what we’re going to do is we just going to do a basic finger picking pattern and move just two shapes around the fret board and this is going to give you a really cool sound. Let me show you the pattern on our right hand first of all. It’s really easy. All I’m going to do just put my thumb on the A string, then you’re going to roll your index finger, second finger, and third finger on the third, second and first strings [Demonstration]. And that’s your basic pattern for the whole thing.
So the first shape we’re going to do is this right here. You're going to take your middle finger and put it on the 9th fret of your fourth string, take your index finger, up and down the 8th fret of your second string. That’s the first shape we’re going to do.
So, if you hit your 5th string with your thumb and then just do the roll we talked about with your index, middle and ring finger, do that. And then again, we’re going to do instead of the 5th string, we’re going to start on the fourth string and do the same roll. That’s going to be the entire pattern for this little lick I came up with.
[Demonstration]
Now move your shape you have right here, down two frets and put exact same thing [Demonstration]. Now here’s what changes a bit, the shape changes with our left hand, but our strumming pattern, our picking pattern with our right hand stays the same. Instead of having a shape like this [Demonstration], you’re going to slide down with your middle finger, two frets and then you’re going to grab the second string on the 5th fret with your ring finger. Same pattern with your right hand, I’ll slide this shape down just one fret play the same pattern you do with your right hand [Demonstration].
To finish the pattern off, I’m going to grab the 5th fret on our sixth string, take the top four strings play them with your thumb, index, middle and ring finger. Once you finished playing that last note, you’re going to drag your ring finger through all six strings coming down so that little part slowly is this right here [Demonstration].
So let me play The Lake for you slowly and then I’ll play it quickly for you okay?
[Demonstration]
Okay, so this will give you an idea of what open G tuning sounds like on the acoustic guitar, just making up some really cool shapes and moving them around. If you want too, you can also do the whole Rolling Stones thing by just making a barré on the 7th fret. And then kind of using the shape where you’re using earlier, where your third finger is on the 4th string, on the 9th fret and then your middle finger comes up and grabs the 8th fret on second string.
[Demonstration]
Move that down two frets and you can do kind of the same thing [Demonstration] and then you can finish off with just an open G. You can also play just your open G, then move it up to the 5th fret, move that up to the 7th fret, back down to the 5th and then open again, if you want to get some real simple barré chords that are just moving around like that.
So have fun with his tuning and experiment with it for yourself.
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