The Easiest Way to Understand Open Tunings

[Music] so hey this is justin johnson welcome to the intermediate slide guitar video course so this video course is designed for players who are familiar with the foundations of playing slide guitar you know the beginner stuff how to hold the slide how to control the guitar how to mute strings i'll be talking about some of these but if you need a brush up on some of the foundation some of the fundamental techniques then make sure you check out my beginner course video course for slide guitar that's part of this instructional series since we've covered all those foundational techniques in my beginner video series on slide guitar we're going to get into one of the other topics that i probably get the most questions asked about when it comes to slide guitar and that's what kind of tunings do you use and how do you use specifically open tunings to help you play slide guitar and to help you make the the best use of those six strings you have when you're playing the slide first of all i guess the best question to answer is what is an open tuning and how does that differ from standard tuning which most guitar players are probably very familiar with that's the most standard tuning there is really okay so standard tuning is um starting from the low string e a d g b and your high e string standard tuning is great because it makes it to where a lot of the patterns you know scales chord shapes those patterns on the fretboard become very close and very easy they come in convenient shapes that really fall under your four fingers when you're playing [Music] scales just uh are nice and easy to play things like that but then the problem is when you play uh pick up the slide it starts becoming a lot of motion you know you're having to really move around a lot to hit those scales melodies and especially chords you know if i wanted to play this let's say open e chord right here e major chord i could play it down here i could play it up here you know i can move to these different shapes but i can't actually hit you know a big nice six string chord using the slide i can go in little chord fragments [Music] but i can't just strum a chord and that's because if i strummed open if i just played all these strings open right now it's not harmonious it doesn't make any sense harmonically and so when i move the slide up the fretboard essentially what i'm doing is i'm taking whatever that note combination is on those open strings and i'm moving it up in the exact same pattern and that doesn't make any sense harmonically and so that's why you start thinking okay if i'm going to be playing with a slide i'm basically playing with one finger and i want that one finger to make a certain chord that's when open tunings come in so let's take this e major chord for example if i wanted to play an e major chord down here i could use this shape right here when i strum all six strings that sounds nice and harmonious and that's that's an e major what if i wanted to make this the chord that my open strings are based on basically that way when i move a slide up and down the fretboard that chord shape starts moving with me well that's exactly what an open tuning will do if i tune these three strings that are not open right now and i tune into these notes that'll be a b an e and a g sharp then i'll have an open [Music] tuning and that's what i've just done [Music] so now i've tuned these open strings to mimic the pitch of those fingers being pressed down to make that e major chord so now because of that i'm tuned to a chord i'm tuned to e major and this is called open e anytime you hear the term open tuning it means that the strings when they're open or basically when you're not fretting anything are going to be tuned to whatever chord that tuning is named after so open e tuning is named after e major so those open strings are going to be tuned to that e major chord and again this works out great for slide guitar because like i said before i can use the slide and as i move the slide up and down the fretboard i'm essentially moving that major chord up and down the fret fretboard so the higher i go the higher the pitch gets but it's going to stay that major chord for all six strings so for example there's an open e that's the open e tuning so that's an e chord if i move it up to the third fret i've still got a major chord but that's going to be a g major now a major d major and so on for every fret so it can get really confusing you know when you're thinking okay this is an open e this is an open d this is an open a this is an open g and we're going to talk about all these different tunings here in this video course so to understand how these open tunings work and how they interact it's good to know a little bit of the music theory involved in how a major chord is built out of three notes and so not to get too bogged down in music theory i'm going to give you the essential knowledge that basically will let you know a little bit about how these open tunings are constructed how the major chord is constructed and that will give you a frame of reference for how to compare these tunings to one another so basically um the major chord is three notes it's comprised of three notes and you basically just repeat those in different octaves so when i start on this low e string that e is going to be the root note and this major chord is going to be derived from what's called a root note a major third and a fifth so you have the root which is an e [Music] you have a g sharp which is your major third and then you have a fifth which is a b so you have your root your third and your fifth and that's basically how you spell this chord and this tuning right here so if you go down from the base string it's e b which is the fifth an e which is an octave higher than the first e that's your root again a g sharp that's the major third that's what makes it a major chord a b again that's a that's your fifth again and then your e which is another octave higher of the root so together that makes a major chord [Music] so i'm telling you this because if you take let's say you ignore those notes but you take that spelling of uh root fifth root major third fifth root and you just lower all of those pitches down one whole step then you'll get an open d tuning okay so i've just retuned the guitar and now i'm in open d tuning so now all of my notes on this open string are going to be tuned to a d major chord instead of an e major chord but the thing that's great about e major and how it relates to d major these are two of the most common slide guitar tunings is that essentially they can be thought of as the exact same tuning because the patterns are exactly the same all i did was take those same patterns the same tuning model of root fifth root major third fifth and root and i lowered the pitch of all of those notes down one whole step so instead of starting on an e i'm starting on a d now so now in open d the notes are d a d f sharp a and d but again you know what's great is if you learn a song and open e-tuning or maybe you learn some riffs you could play that exact same riff in open e or open d it doesn't matter the only difference is it's going to be a whole step higher or lower but you can actually play with the same muscle memory the same patterns on the fretboard and everything just works out great it's just that the pitch is either higher or lower so you may wonder you know if open e and open d are so similar why would you even go between the two you know why why pick one over the other and there's lots of different reasons for that you know let's say you're playing a song with a band and the band's used to playing a song in d and you're used to playing an open e well you can just tune your guitar down to open d and now you'll be playing in the key that the song is in or let's say the singer you know has to hit a certain note and you have to play in a certain key that's when it's good to tune your guitar and make sure that you know i might know this song in this key or i practiced it in open d maybe but the singer needs to sing it a little bit higher so i can move up to a you know an open e or maybe up to an open f or something like that which is a half step higher than that again all those patterns if you practice them in one pattern they're going to apply to those other keys and so that's one of the good things to know when you're determining what key you're going to play in plus sometimes a song can sound you know like i like going down to open d sometimes because songs sound a little swampy or you know it's lower pitch and the strings get a little looser alternatively if you want a tight feel on the strings it's good to tune up a little bit and that helps push back against the tension of the slide on the strings so you might find a guitar parts a little hard to play slide with on open d when the strings are more loose so you tighten the tension up raise it up to an open e and you'll find that the slides a little bit easier to play in open e tuning when the strings are a little bit tighter so we can apply the same knowledge to two of the other very popular very bluesy classic open tunings and that's open g and open a tunings these have a different pattern as far as you know the root the fifth and the third and where it falls on the fretboard but they relate to each other the same you know open a is a whole step higher than openg other than that they're the exact same pattern of tuning okay so i've tuned back to standard tuning to show you uh this open a tuning we're going to start with that if i show you this chord shape right here a lot of you might recognize it it's an it's an open a chord shape a major [Music] and if we look at the

Channel: Live from the Guitar Loft

Views: 91,062

Keywords: guitar, lesson, guitarist, tunings, open, open tunings, tutorial, instruction, free, gear, music, blues, rock, rock and roll, justin johnson, best, guitar world

Id: Z2sLHaV7zjk

Length: 12min 5sec (725 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 15 2020