D Standard | This Might Make You Switch

[Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] one of my favorite things about being a guitar player is experimenting and trying new things trying different ways and different approaches of playing the guitar it's a great way to break out of ruts and repetition in your playing and one of the best ways to do this in my experience is to experiment with different tunings open tunings are great alternate tunings are great but there's one tuning in particular that i first started playing around with about a year ago that i think more people need to be using and that is d standard now d standard has been used by a lot of players over the years it's a different effect but i don't see a lot of people talking about it or using it nowadays and i think it's a shame i think that d standard is one of the best tunings for a guitar so much so that i'm kind of contemplating switching several of my main guitars over to d standard and just using it as possibly my primary tuning at least for the foreseeable future and i'm gonna explain why now before we get started a quick announcement i'm very proud to announce that my new guitar course fretboard fundamentals is finishing up and will be releasing very very soon we are now taking pre-orders for the course and you can get a discount on the course if you pre-order it via the link in the description box down below this course is designed to give you the fundamentals that you need no matter if you're a complete beginner or you're an advanced player who's been playing for years and you have some holes in your guitar knowledge and knowledge of the fretboard we designed this course to benefit a wide variety of players it starts off with the fundamentals of music theory and harmony and scales and chord structure and how that applies to the guitar and it goes all the way to playing over tracks that i actually recorded on real sessions with real guitar parts that i played on and you get the actual tracks the actual stems to play over and record your own guitar parts on as well if you want more information on fretboard fundamentals and when it's going to be available and how to pre-order it that's all in the description box down below now let's grab a guitar and throw it into d standard and i'll uh explain what i'm on about here so like the name of the tuning suggests d standard is basically the same thing as standard e tuning just a whole step or whole tone down so instead of e a d g b e we now have d g c f a d so right now my guitar is in regular e standard tuning now when you're tuning down there's a couple things to think about here depending on the type of guitar you have it may need a minute or two to adjust now the nice thing about d standard is you can just tune your guitar down with relatively minimal changes to the guitar's setup or playability with a few exceptions so if this is something you're experimenting with you don't have to change your stream gage or your setup but if this is something that you're going to live with for a while i would recommend making a few changes first thing would be your stream gauge if you're gonna have a guitar that lives in d standard i would probably go up a string gage so if you normally play nines i'd go up to tens or tens to elevens and start there depending on your guitar and the way it's set up you may need to go up or down a gauge but it's worth experimenting with the other thing is for starting out if you're just going to experiment with this tuning i would grab a guitar that has a solid tailpiece a stop tail piece or not a tremolo the problem with something like a strat for example is depending on how you have the bridge set up how much spring tension you have on the bridge dropping the guitar down a whole step is going to dramatically change the string tension on the neck and the bridge and it may throw your strat set up completely out of whack so if you have a strap and you want to go to d standard tuning i would go up a string gauge and adjust your bridge spring tension accordingly to get the guitar set up the way you like it but if you have a guitar with a stop tail piece i would start with that all right so now i've got the guitar completely tuned down and here we are in d standard so right there that's one of the main reasons i love this tuning immediately you have access to these beautiful lush low cords like this low d major here that's not something that you can access in e-standard [Music] [Music] so my first experience with d standard tuning was actually when i learned jimi hendrix's voodoo child off the electric ladyland record not the slight return version but this really smokey slow haunting version that he does in d standard [Music] if you haven't heard that i would highly recommend you go and check it out it's a great example of how just dark and moody this tuning can be but there's more to open d than just that it's more than just slow grimy blues sound although it's absolutely great for that and that's really where i started to get tuned into it so to speak last year when i was doing the backstage live shows with my band deacon knight i would often take this guitar this firebird and leave it in d standard because it really changes the attitude of the guitar something about loosening the string tension and going down a whole step changes the way the guitar responds it changes the way the pickups sound it changes the way the guitar hits the front end of the amp it's not just a tuning thing it's not just changing the pitch of the strings that you're playing it changes the entire character of the guitar and as such it's changing how i approach the guitar it changes the decisions that i make the chord voicings that i play the licks that i go for changing your tuning to something like d standard will break you out of a rut if you're in one it also changes the way the guitar interacts with effects one of my favorite things to do with well any tuning in general but especially with d standard is to hit it with some octave fuzz and some unified a la that jimi hendrix thing oh [Music] so now let's take a closer look at some different ways to actually use this tuning and how to approach it now the nice thing is because this is a standard tuning and not an open tuning or an alternate tuning your standard chord shapes all work right your typical g major chord shape which typically lives here well that's no longer g that's now f because it's a whole step down this is no longer f this is e flat and then this is no longer e this is now d major so once you've done the math in your head and you've started to figure out what chords now exist in this new tuning you can start to apply it to songs that you already know and i think this is the real sort of secret power behind d standard it's not a super low tuning like c sharp or c standard and it's close enough to standard tuning that you can use these chord shapes in the keys that you typically play in so let's take c major for example typically your c major chord would live here but since we've tuned down a whole step we're now going up to here which means we can play this voicing [Music] [Applause] now let's take a c major progression like 1 4 6 5 and i'll show you how i might approach that in d standard tuning so [Music] [Music] you can tell that's quite a bit different than how you would typically play a one four six five in the key of c so you start to understand what i mean by changing your approach changing how you're playing in the choices that you're making in this tuning versus something like regular e standard another really great thing about this tuning is it opens up the key of e flat really nicely now e flat is a key i find myself playing in a lot with singers because depending on their vocal range it actually can work really well for a vocalist but as a guitar player it leaves you in kind of an awkward position you either a have to tune a guitar down a half step to e flat which is a great option and i've done that before or you're forced to be stuck with closed voicings bar chords triads things like that but here our e flat now becomes this f shape so in the key of e flat you can now think about it like this f position here this first position closed voicing triad that you typically play but there's so many things you can do with that you can play an e flat sus2 here [Music] and then of course we now have access to the key of d major or minor in the open position which i really think is the bread and butter of this tuning anytime you might use a d chord or be playing in the key of d you can now utilize these beautiful open chord shapes like a d minor 11 at nine or here's a g major sus two so that was just a one and four a d major to a g major but you probably never played a g major that sounded like this so ways to start off in this tuning i would start by using chord shapes that you're already familiar with and then doing the math in your head to try and figure out what they've become right so again instead of c this is now b flat instead of g this is now f instead of a minor this is now g minor it's really simple to figure out everything is just shifted a whole tone or a whole step down and then apply that to chord progressions and songs that you already know and then try and play along with these songs using these new chord shapes and new voicings and you might be surprised how quickly it sort of changes your approach changes your perspective of the fretboard this is also a really great tuning to use with another guitar player let's say you're in a band and there's another rhythm guitarist and you want to play with them but you don't want to play the same part as them well try going lower try tuning your guitar down a whole step and then using the chords voicings down in this open position or in the first position down here on the neck and see how it works with the other guitar part you might be really surprised so those are my thoughts on the d standard tuning and why i love it so much let me know what you think about this tuning is this something that you're gonna experiment with or you use on a regular basis i'd like to know don't forget you can pre-order my new guitar course fretboard fundamentals down in the description box below and you can find my other guitar courses there the tone course and the nashville number system course as well as my helix profiles kemper profiles all that kind of stuff it's all in the description box down below if you haven't done so already be sure to subscribe and click the bell down below so you can be notified when i'm going live and posting new videos here on the channel and thank you guys so much for watching my name is rhett shull and remember there is no plan b you

Channel: Rhett Shull

Views: 255,327

Rating: 4.9257746 out of 5

Keywords: alternate guitar tunings, alternate tuning, new standard tuning, how to tune a guitar, standard d tuning, alternate tunings, dadgad guitar tuning, guitar tunings, open d tuning, drop d, alternate guitar tunings acoustic, alternate guitar tunings for metal, Rhett Shull, Guitar Lesson

Id: Wdf06EjZJAM

Length: 14min 49sec (889 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 09 2021