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Alternate Tunings

I LOVE 'em. Even when I'm not in experimental mode, my guitar is tuned in drop-D (DADGBE) and my 7-string guitar is in a weird drop-G tuning(GDADGBE). But I love to change tunings around. Alternate tunings defeat habits, and create interesting textures and note clusters that are impossible in a 'standard' tuning.

Me being me, I could not care less about 'regular' alternate tunings - open chord tunings, Keith Richards tunings, etc. Since I'm mostly a studio experimenter, the logistics of playing live with alternate tunings doesn't really enter into things and so I really don't think much about just turning tuning knobs, or even restringing the damned things as dictated by my whim (or the dice games I play).

The My Crazy Tunings page contains a collection of tunings I've used over the years. Understand that I don't ever sit down and 'learn' these tunings - my interest is entirely in what chance possibilities I encounter in a totally alien musical landscape. As such, many of these tunings have been used exactly once; I change tuning, I hit record and improvise, and I'm on to the next one. The page is organized thusly:
1) How the guitar is strung
2) What the selection process was for the first tuning
3) A table of tunings(vertical) and tuning genology (horizontal). That is to say, the FIRST tuning (upper left) in any table is the initial tuning for the entire table. Tunings below it are progressive changes from that tuning. Tunings to the right track which tunings are based on which previous tunings. So the tuning to the immediate right will always be identical to the one immediately under the initial tuning, but from there the progression will get more random. At any rate all the tunings are represented on the left side somewhere, and the geniology can't really be important to anyone but me, so if none of that makes sense just ignore it.

Like most things I do, I stole the idea from someone, then exaggerated it. So credit where credit is due, here are some collections of other people's crazy tunings:

• Sonic Youth tunings
• Michael Hedges tunings