Nashville Tuning | Why EVERYONE Should Know It

one of the great things about guitar as an instrument is all the different ways that you can approach it and every time you experiment you change up your style or your approach it leads to different results i've talked about it before but changing up the tuning on your guitar is a really great way to break out of ruts or to get new ideas we've been talking about some different tunings on this channel recently and we're going to continue to do that with today's video focusing on nashville tuning now you've probably heard of nashville tuning but it's a little bit more of an esoteric thing it's not as synonymous as dadgad or drop d or open e would be it's actually a lot more sort of niche but if you're like me you've heard nashville tuning a lot growing up if you've heard hey you by pink floyd we're jumping jack flash from the stones there's countless examples of how to use this tuning and that's what we're going to talk about in today's video i'm going to show you how to put your guitar into nashville tuning and some different ways to use it and show you why you probably want to take an extra guitar you have laying around and put it in nashville tuning before we jump into the video though my new video course fretboard fundamentals is now officially live if you want to learn more about the video course it is linked in the description box down below it is a comprehensive guitar theory course to help you unlock and completely understand the fretboard whether you're a beginner intermediate or advanced player with a few holes in your knowledge this video course is designed to get you up to speed on understanding the fretboard so check it out as well as my other courses in the link in the description box down below with all that other way let's take a look at nashville tuning and how it works [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right so what is nashville tuning well as the name suggests it's a tuning that came from nashville the story goes that around the early to mid 1950s session musicians and producers in nashville who were cutting the now legendary country records of the time were looking for a way to get a little bit more jangle a little bit more top end and sparkle out of the guitar specifically the acoustic guitar and this led to some of the players at the time experimenting with switching these string gauges around what we now know today as nashville tuning is just standard tuning but the low strings the bass strings that are typically wound are replaced with a set of higher strings from a 12 string pack now if you know anything about how 12 strings work you know that on the low strings we have two strings one being the standard string and the one next to it being an octave up and that is a thinner gauge string now what this is gonna do is essentially give us a much brighter jangly higher strung kind of sound now sometimes people will refer to nashville tuning as high strung tuning or high string tuning and that's not exactly true for a high string tuning like they use in some african style music the g string stays the same but in nashville tuning we're going to replace the low e a d and g with the higher strung counterparts from the 12 string pack the b and e the high b and e are going to stay the same and because this is not an alternate tuning because we're still playing in standard all of your typical chord shapes and scale shapes that you already know will work here and the other cool thing about nashville tuning is it's a great option for electrics and acoustics i'm going to show you both examples in this video but first let's start by getting this guitar strung up with a nashville set all right so what i've got here is a typical 12 string electric pack these are d'addario xl's now you don't have to use a 12-string pack nowadays companies like string joy and daddario will actually sell you a pack with string gauges designed for nashville tuning but this is the old-school way of doing it okay so in a typical 12 string pack you're gonna have your two strings these are both uh e strings this is your low e right here and as you can see i have my typical low string right here my standard guitar string and then with it i have the other e which is a whole octave up so for natural tuning i'm going to get rid of the standard string you can just throw that on another guitar and i'm only going to use the thinner version this is actually kind of an efficient way to buy strings because then you get two guitars worth the strings out of one pack what guitar stars won't tell you what they don't what they don't want you to know all right so i've got this guitar strung up and stretched out and this is what it sounds like [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] so you can tell it's pretty jangly it's really bright and airy and you know by itself it might not sound all that appealing it can sound kind of thin it's lacking in the low end but the point of the nashville tuning is not to sound good on its own necessarily the real magic and purpose behind this tuning is to work well in the context of a full mix a full production and i'm going to show you what i mean so one common thing that we do a lot in the studio or when you're producing music is to double guitar parts and there's a lot of reasons to do this i actually made a video about this years ago on my channel but one of the main reasons behind doubling guitar parts is it adds weight and it adds width to a guitar sound partially because you can't play the part exactly right more than once it we're human beings it's impossible to play something perfectly and those little discrepancies those little minor imperfections between the two parts when they're stacked on top of each other add this beautiful width it's the same reason you would double a vocal a double a rhythm guitar part double anything the cool thing about nashville tuning is you can essentially fake a 12 string sound but you can do things that a normal 12 string cannot do let me show you what i mean i'm going to track a quick little part here on the nashville tune guitar and then i'm going to double it i'm going to play the exact same thing exact same picking pattern same chord and everything and then i'm gonna pan the guitar as hard left and right and you should be able to hear what i'm talking about so i'm gonna turn my click [Music] [Applause] so what's happening there is the two guitars are sort of acting as a 12 string and that you have the primary note the fundamental and then you have the octave up note happening but what's interesting about this is a you can hard pan the guitars left and right which you can't do with a 12 string also you can use two different guitars with different pickups you can use a completely different signal chain if you want which you can't do with the normal 12 string you can also do interesting panning and phasing effects between the left and right channel which you can't do with the normal 12 string so this is a really great way to sort of fake the 12 string sound if you don't already have one plus it opens up a whole world of other possibilities that a normal 12 string can't really pull off but there's way more to nashville tuning than just faking a 12 string sound it's great on acoustic parts check this out [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay so you should have noticed that the acoustic sounded way bigger part of that's because there's two guitars but it's a different type of sound than if i just had two of the same standard tuning guitars playing at the same time that's also great and it's also great for doubling and widening the sound but when you're using a nashville tuned guitar like this one it's not just doubling the part but it's also adding some different interval relationships and the way the chords are voiced and it's really opening up the sound of the guitar as a whole so for example let's take a look at our typical g major voicing down here on the third fret now if you actually take a look at what's happening here it's kind of interesting we've got some double notes here that aren't typically in the same register in a standard tune guitar specifically this d here right there we've got a unison d the same note on two different strings and like a 12 string when you have the two strings ringing in the same note they're slightly out of pitch with one another and you get a nice sort of natural chorusing effect sort of moves back and forth same thing happens with our g instead of being two octaves apart the only one octave apart and there's a difference in the tone and the response when the two notes are a whole octave apart versus two whole octaves so let's take a look at a fifth string root triad like c major here and you'll hear the difference usually this major third on top is an octave or two octaves higher than the root but here it's almost like a closed voicing but i'm spread out here and that has some interesting implications for other chord voicings if we make it a minor chord [Music] that minor third being lower in pitch in the same register as the root here on the fifth string adds a really interesting characteristic now let's take a look at some slightly more complex chords let's play an e minor 11 add nine [Music] now that's a pretty interesting chord to begin with but in this nashville tuning it's even more interesting it's almost more of a piano voicing it's like this interesting cluster of intervals and it also sounds like i'm changing the picking pattern typically all the notes ascend in pitch if i'm picking for my fifth string up to my first string but here it's changing [Music] and that has some interesting implications for your picking patterns it can change up your typical picking patterns and make them sound more interesting [Music] [Music] [Applause] this is what i mean when i talk about changing your tuning can instantly open you up and break you out of ruts the voicings that you typically play don't sound the same in nashville tuning and the picking patterns in the right hand don't sound like they typically do and this is extra apparent when you start to add some effects and make things a little bit more ambient one of my favorite things to do with this tuning is to put together a really interesting ambient tone and just have some fun [Music] [Music] so that is nashville tuning let me know what you think about it in the comment section down below are you going to throw one of your guitars into a nashville tuning and experiment with it i'd highly recommend it i think it's a ton of fun but i want to know your thoughts on it if you haven't done so already be sure to subscribe here to my youtube channel you can check out the affiliate links to the gear that we used in today's video if you buy through one of those links i earn a small commission which helps me on running the channel don't forget to check out my video courses including the brand new fretboard fundamentals link down below as well and uh follow me on tik tok we're making some tick tocks over there now so thank you guys so much for watching my name is rhett shull and remember there is no plan b

Channel: Rhett Shull

Views: 275,305

Rating: 4.9266515 out of 5

Keywords: nashville tuning, tuning, guitar, rhett shull, alternate tuning, guitar lesson, guitar lessons, 12 string guitar, guitar tutorial, how to play guitar, acoustic guitar, recording studio, guitar tutorials, advanced guitar lessons, learn guitar, fingerstyle tutorial, acoustic guitar lessons, high strung guitar, twelve string guitar, advanced guitar, guitar accessories you need, guitar accessories you should have

Id: _r856iyoAHU

Length: 13min 29sec (809 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 01 2021