Open G Tuning Part 1

Rob Schumann: Subject of this tutorial is Open G Tuning. Open tunings are very interesting, because as the name indicates you can produce chords just by strumming open strings. In this case in I am getting a G Major chord by just strumming the first 5 strings on the guitar. So let's take a look at the pitches that the strings are tuned to and then we will look at some application and chord figerings.

The sixth string is tuned on a whole step to a D note, the fifth string is tuned on a whole step to a G, the fourth string stays the same on the D, the third string it stays the same on a G, the second string stays the same on the B and the first string is tuned on a whole step to a D. By having the ability to play a chord using these open strings, you can then be free to add melody notes on any of the other strings with having a hold a chord at the same time. You can also produce other major chords by just holding the first finger down across five strings.

It's make it very easy to embellish or add extensions to that major chord with the other three fingers. The Rolling Stones is an example often have a guitar tuned to an Open G and they will hold that major chord and use something like the second and the third finger to accent that chord and you will see very few of their songs that don't have that particular sound in them.

Well, our major/minor chords are going to be altered in their fingerings, so let's look at some chords that would be associated with the key of G. We will look at how we would have to change them for this particular tuning. I just play through them once and then on the next segment we will go through them with a little bit more detail. Of course, the G we've got that open.

Notice that all of those I left this first string droning the whole time. I am just basically putting a D on top of each chord and you can get away with that. That was using the fifth string as the root of all those. You can also do your chords having the sixth string as the root so this will look like this.

So in that case we had the sixth string as the root and I was leaving a D and a B droning on top of each chord. So in our segment we will take a look at this fingering in a little bit more details that we can play chords out of the key of G.

Jim Messina: We are going to talk about a song that I will call 'Angry Eyes'. 'Angry Eyes' is sort of an evaluation of a theme that I had put in a movie one time and it had a dark edge to it.


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