Should You Tune Down Your Guitar?

there are two things I have a hard time tuning down my enthusiasm for dinosaur documentaries and guitar strings but in the spirit of wisdom and education we're talking about down tuning guitars and we're going to use an acoustic guitar as an example because I think you get to hear the total difference is easier but all this information can also be used on an electric guitar so basically a guitar is tuned normally to standard tuning or East and or tuning what that means is the strings go EA D G B e now if you tuned down all you're doing is sometimes tuning all of them down relative to each other so the example we're going to use right now is going to be tuning down to D standard so that means is my East Wrangham has now been tuned down to a D my a string has been tuned down to a G D string has been tuned down to a see the g string has been tuned down to an F the B string has been tuned down to an A and the E string the high E string has also been tuned down to a d ok so everything has moved down relative to each other and there are a couple reasons we might want to do this number one I think is if you're trying to accommodate a singers vocal range and maybe playing I just kind of standard open chords like a C to G a minor or something is a little too high for them to sing with and they just need to be down a little bit you can kind of tune your guitar down without having to change the chords now you can also do that just kind of like to accompany a guitar player like if you're playing a C chord and it's too hard for them you could be like ok I'm just gonna play a tune to down from a C and make it a b-flat and then just play a B flat chord but you might have to play it in a different part of the neck so what down tuning allows us to do is play the same open chords but just to get a lower sound so for example if you play E major Florida this is technically now a D major chord played a G major chord technically now an F major chord so on and so forth okay now there are a lot of different reasons besides just trying to fit a vocal range into an accompaniment type setting it actually drastically well sometimes it can be dressy depending the guitar affects the tone of the guitar itself because if you think about it once you slack in the strings like all the strings are going to be loosened it's going to lose some of the tension so what it also could do is if you have like a guitar that has a really high action and it's kind of whole hard to hold the strings down down tuning can really help with that some guitar players who have famously tuned down and be like Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan a lot of times they would tune down a half step so they would play in what c-flat standard again we kind of skip that we just went from e all the way down to D another thing is you might notice that you have and a more aggressive heavier sound a lot of metal guys love to down tune right we're gonna do some audio examples in a second but basically on an acoustic guitar you're gonna hear that there is definitely a tonal difference some metal players and even in other genres will tune down to C standard which is really really I'm pretty far down pretty dress ly far down and if you do that you might actually need to get the set up of your guitar adjusted I would say most guitars can handle tuning down a full step but if you tune down to full steps you might actually need to compensate for from just the amount of select that's going on now another thing that you can do is if you're down tuning you release some of that tension you can actually use thicker strings like right now these are just twelve on an acoustic guitar but like if you were to play like tens on an electric guitar and you like the feel of tens but you want something like super down tune you could tune down to see it and then get your guitar set up for twelve and a lot of people would say that that feels like a set of tens even though the strings are thicker there's a lot of kind of different points of view on that but this is something that you want to try out for yourself a lot of guitar players like the feel of heavier strings they kind of feel like they can bend easier also to again if you think of like a slackened guitar string with the release of some of the tension from standard tuning you will notice that you can kind of bend strings maybe farther than you normally otherwise could have so it almost does feel like a lighter gauge of strings even if you still have heavier set strings so accompanying a vocal range just getting a different timbre of the sound of the instrument it kind of the the downside is sometimes especially on a cushy tire it can make it seem a little fuzzier if you really drive the strings some people kind of like the sound of that some people don't like the sound of that it's really just up to you that's like to taste for sure but yeah just a company vocal range getting a different tone out of your instrument being able to bend strings easier and actually kind of having more options for different thicknesses in gauges of strings are all just different reasons to down tuna so with all that being said we're gonna kind of just hear the difference of the exact same chords one in standard one down tuned now for the down tuned sound examples I'm gonna have a capo on the 2nd fret because what that's doing if I'm playing a capo on the 2nd fret E major chord with a tune down a full step that's giving me an E major right so if you see a capo on it you're gonna know that it's going to be the down conversion no Capo's is gonna be e standard supposed to get to it [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so definitely what I noticed was action-wise it is considerably easier to play if it's tuned down a step even with the capo on but there is kind of like what I would consider an acceptable level of buzz enos that kind of gets added to some of the chords but anyways if you have any questions please hit me up on Instagram Twitter or the comment section or website and I will talk to you guys as soon as I can thanks a lot

Channel: Sean Daniel

Views: 108,113

Keywords: should i downtune, downtune guitar, how to downtune a guitar, why downtune?, why tune down?, d standard, what is d standard, how to tune down, how to djent, sean daniel, d standard tutorial, downtune with capo, capo guitar, alternate guitar tunings

Id: q5X_76pAcyA

Length: 8min 0sec (480 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 10 2017