Open G | Why EVERYONE Should Know It.

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] foreign [Music] um [Music] bye [Music] [Music] so recently i've been playing a lot of slide specifically on my resonator and and i do that anytime i'm feeling kind of burned out or in a rut in my playing slide and slide blues really helps to pull me out personally of a rut kind of reignite my passion for playing guitar but most of my time spent on slide has been an open e that's what i learned in that's what i was the most comfortable in i've made several videos about open e-tuning and slide guitar but a couple of weeks ago i wanted to kind of change things up so i switched over to openg and i think that openg is one of the most versatile and useful tunings for guitar in general period it's not just for old slide blues stuff from the 30s and 40s today we're going to talk about that open g tuning okay so let's start off by getting tuned up from standard tuning to openg it's really simple you're just going to tune three strings down from standard tuning to get to open g starting with your low e string your sixth string is going to go from e down a whole step to d your fifth string a is going to go down a whole step to g your fourth string d is gonna stay the same third string g is gonna stay the same second string b is gonna stay the same and our first string is gonna go from e down to d so when you're done you should sound like this [Music] and the reason we call this open g is because we have a g major triad whenever we strum our open strings from the fifth string down and if we strum all six strings together we end up with a g second inversion where we have the fifth and the base d now in the description box down below i've put together a pdf download to go with this episode so if you're new to this you can download that and follow along at home i highly recommend it it's free and it's down in the description box below now the cool thing about open tunings like openg is that you really only need to know a few basic things to get up and rolling and playing something that's really musical starting with a basic one four five blues progression now if you're going to play a g blues in open g it's really simple our one chord is g major and like we just said that's just the open strings now the four chord in the key of g is c major and we play a c major by barring five strings from the fifth fret now we get there because our root c is on the fifth string you can also play with a slide [Music] and then the five chord in the key of g is going to be d major which is just a whole step up from c [Music] because the guitar is tuned to an open tuning as long as you bar anywhere on the fretboard you're going to get a major triad based off of whatever root note that is now the next thing that i like to understand anytime i'm working in a new tuning is where my scales are where my intervals are because this is how we're going to start to build melody ideas and learn how to improvise and solo and just play musically in this tuning so first thing we're going to do is g major the g major scale based off of the fifth string g root and it goes like this there's one octave here's my second octave [Music] pretty simple and what's cool about openg is you can start to string these notes together while you're strumming because we're in the key we're playing diatonically and you instantly start to get something that sounds melodic and musical [Music] now let's start with our minor pentatonic which is incredibly easy in openg because it's super close to the minor pentatonic scale shape that you already know in standard it's gonna happen between the third and fifth fret cell here on the neck just like the minor pentatonic and standard tuning works but it's gonna sound like this [Music] and whenever you throw the slide into the equation that's where you start to get into this blues territory [Music] i i genuinely love this tuning so much it's become probably my favorite tuning to play in recently [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] now what's really interesting to me is how influential this tuning has been over the years kind of started with the early blues men that were using it on on dobro and acoustic guitar and playing these 12 bar blues standards and putting them on records in the 30s 40s and 50s and there's a direct line of influence between those artists and the records that they made and the early british rock bands the stones for example and it's not just the stones you look at zeppelin jimmy page and how much it's utilized in their music and on to even more modern bands like coldplay for example openg is all over the place now if you're like me anytime you're trying to learn something new on guitar you're trying to get it under your fingers the best way to do it is learn a song learn a handful of songs but specifically for open g i think one of the best songs to start with is walking blues by robert johnson [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so in and around london in the late 50s and early 60s you had guys like keith richards listening to songs like that by robert johnson and muddy waters these american blues men that were taking this sound that was birthed in the american south and they took that american delta blues sound that had been kind of passed over in the states and they fell in love with it and they took that sound and this tuning and did things like [Music] now that is an incredibly familiar sound that keith richards helped make popular and it's really simple you just bar and make a major chord and then you're gonna essentially make it a suspended voicing with your second and third finger here making what is in standard tuning like a minor seven chord shape and then that's just like a straight ahead 12 bar blues shuffle that we all learn when we first pick up guitar because you're barring on the fifth and fourth string right here you're making what's essentially a power chord and you're raising that fifth up a whole tone to the six and you're getting that [Music] and then also later in the 60s you had another british band take that delta blue sound and do something like this [Music] i mean you can directly see the lineage between that and [Music] [Applause] i i love this stuff it's so cool to me and then after the british bring it back to the states in around 1990 a band from my home state of georgia takes that same kind of sound and does [Music] sort of melding the two things right you have the traditional open g blues you know flat third to four kind of voicing [Music] and then also that keith richards suspension and this sound and tuning remained popular and bands like pearl jam pick it up and do this [Music] now one thing that i've sort of found and thought for a while about open g is it it's kind of pigeon holed as one of those handful of sounds that i just played but it's actually capable of way more than that it's capable of really modern sounds too if you know how to use [Music] [Applause] [Music] it [Music] [Music] [Music] so i think this is why openg is probably one of the most if not the most underrated guitar tunings of all time and it's because so many of us guitar players just think of open g as that sort of old school blues kind of sound but it's capable of so much more than that so because we're in an open triad tuning with a fifth in the bass it allows us to put together some really really interesting chord voicings that we might not think of doing or might not be able to do in standard tuning now in my mind the best way to learn this is just to experiment throw your guitar in open g and start playing around with different chord voicings and intervals and see what you can come up with but there's a few concepts that i'll give you to kind of help you get started so the first thing is knowing how to play the harmonized major scale all the way up and down the neck based off of the fifth string root just using like an open tenth voicing for example kind of a like a piano voicing you hear this all the time in pop music nowadays a lot of pop guitar parts are played with these kind of chords and i talked about this in my nashville number system course uh quite a bit which is available down below shameless plug so essentially all we're going to do is play up the g major harmonized scale like this [Laughter] now if you're just starting out with this the first thing to learn is where the root notes of each chord are basically you're going to play up a g major scale off of the fifth string [Music] and then you want to stack that chord's major or minor third on top of the root now we're going to play the major third or minor third an octave up from the root so that's actually going to be the tenth scale degree which is why i refer to these as a tenth voicing earlier and that's just going to sound like this [Music] now just by using that you can start to play simple chord progressions in the key of g diatonic chord progressions with just those shapes and again because we're tuned to an open chord you can let the extra strings ring out for some really nice like add 9 voicings and suspended [Music] voicings and then you can start to stack intervals on top of it start rooting around based off of different chord root notes to try and find what intervals sound good that's how i came up with the part that i was playing at the beginning of the piece this first chord i'm playing is just a g major but i'm adding the fourth right here [Music] with that tenth on top with the extra strings ringing out and you get this really nice kind of spread voicing it sounds almost like a piano chord [Music] beautiful and then i'm taking that shape and i'm just sliding it down to d you can hit the low d in there and then i just took that shape and slid it up to e flat and i raised to a sharp four to get kind of like an e flat lydian sort of sound really nice chord and then the other thing to think about is how to incorporate the bottom string the low d string into your chord voicings like [Music] this so right there this is a c major add 9 kind of sound right here and then i'm adding the f on top so you're getting sort of like a inverted c major sound slide that up to d then up to e minor and you can see with just a little bit of experimentation and trying out different root notes and intervals you can build these really beautiful sounding chords and guitar parts that you might not think of doing in standard tuning so there you go that's openg tuning i hope you found this video useful i really want to start doing more teaching videos like this here on the channel in 2021 i had a lot of fun making it uh if you're interested i have a few video courses available for download in the description box below as well as helix presets kemper profiles as well some quad cortex profiles on the way not yet but they will be available soon you can check that out down below you can check out my website and sign up for my mailing list down there to keep up to date on when i've got new products and courses coming out as well as always i really appreciate the support you guys show please subscribe here to my youtube channel you can also follow me on instagram at rhett shoal and check out my second channel rhett shul studio which is linked down below i may actually do a video on how i was recording the resonator today because i'm actually really happy with the sounds i got anyways let me know down in the comment section what you want to see next in this teaching series and i will see you guys on the next video thank you so much for watching and remember there is no plan b you

Channel: Rhett Shull

Views: 515,179

Keywords: open g tuning, open g, open g guitar lesson, rolling stones, slide guitar, keith richards, guitar lesson, guitar lessons, acoustic guitar, acoustic guitar lesson, how to play guitar, open g tuning songs, open tunings, open tuning, Rhett Shull, mule resonator, mule resonator guitars, mule resophonic, mule resophonic guitars, open tunings for acoustic guitar, open tuning slide guitar, open tuning guitar, slide guitar lesson, keith richards guitar lesson, guitar tips

Id: WRAK3WBSKWw

Length: 17min 33sec (1053 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 20 2021