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Alternate tunings used to get richer chords on a guitar

by Tim Darling (email)

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In a standard guitar tuning, the strings are 5 half steps apart (with one 4 half step gap): 5-5-5-4-5 are the gaps from E->A, A->D, etc. This enables players to play chords whose notes are about 5 half steps apart which makes the guitar capable of sparse chords with a large range from high to low. For example, an open G chord in this tuning spans 2 full octaves.

The tunings I started working with have the strings much closer together, for example, most often with gaps of 4-3-2-3-4 half steps between strings. There are a number of tunings below, but there's one I use most often and the others follow a similar pattern.

When playing big band scores, the chords are often much more thickly built with a lower range from top to bottom. See Guitar 2 bar 36 ("Verse 1->2 Turnaround" section) in Summer Wind. The chord couplets go from Db/F/Ab (gaps of 4 and 3) to F/Ab/B (gaps of 3 and 3) to Ab/B/Eb (gaps of 3 and 4). Altogether it makes one larger chord Db/F/Ab/B/Eb - a Db9. Db9 is not an uncommon chord to play on the guitar, but it is almost never played with the notes in that order - it would be a 9-8-6-4-4-x fretting (from low E to high E). A very nice sounding chord, but just about impossible to play. With the alternate tuning used, it becomes a simple 3-5-5-5-5-x.

By sharing these tunings which I had to develop to transcribe and record the orchestra parts, I hope others will use them to play and build other compositions around chords such as the one above. One reason these tunings have probably never, or hardly ever been used before, is because a guitar with standard strings cannot be tuned to them.

For a regular guitar, a different set of string gauges would be needed, as shown in the 4th column in the diagrams below.

I recorded many of the parts with a Line 6 Variax guitar, which allows for virtual tuning. I used this sometimes, but overall prefer the sound of a completely restrung guitar with the right gauges of the strings. But with a Variax, switching between tunings (including standard tuning) is easy: the tunings can be saved and the guitar can switch between any of them with a turn of a knob.

The best examples of what these tunings can sound like in a standard rock song are the guitar parts recorded for "Last Goodbye", "Blind Willie McTell", and "I'm a Good Man but a Poor Man".
Open G#6
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(mp3)
As used in


Open C6 (note it is also just a capo 4 on the "Open G#6" tuning above)
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(mp3)
As used in


Open C#6 (note it is also just a capo 5 on the "Open G#6" tuning above)
Play clip   
(mp3)
As used in
(same idea as above)

Open A6 (note it is also just a capo 1 on the "Open G#6" tuning above)
As used in
(same idea as above)


Open D#6
Play clip   
(mp3)
In this tuning, you can also play a standard barred major chord, E-style (e.g. 5-7-7-6-5-5) and it sounds great too, as in the intro in Swinging on a Star (trombone line).

In the clip above, I just played: 0-2-2-1-0-0 (an open E in standard tuning, here an A#), the same 5 half steps higher, and then power chords, ending on 12th fret harmonics. For the "power chords", 0-2-2-x-x-x in this tuning is A#-D-F - an A# major. x-0-2-2-x-x is C-F-A - an F major.

Note it also has 4-3-2-3-4 half steps between strings, the order is just a bit different.

As used in



There are a number of other variations used below to help with specific parts in the Sinatra recordings.

Open Bm6
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(mp3)
As used in


Open Bm6 (alternate)
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(mp3)
As used in


Open D#m6
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(mp3)
As used in
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All text and pictures copyright © 2013 Tim Darling.