My Music And Song's

Archive for November, 2009

Sometimes it seems as if the people who write songs on the piano have all the advantages. Just think: no barre chords; the ability to play chords with 10 notes; perfectly ordered ninths, 11ths and 13ths; easy inversions; melody in one hand, chords and bass in the other; weird chord changes at the slip of a finger; a seven-octave range . . . and so on.

Well, there is one big exception, and that’s the wonderful world of altered and open tunings. Many guitarists have written a couple of songs in a tuning that is not E A D G B E; others have done almost nothing else but play in altered tunings. For some, this was a case of necessity being the mother of invention: no one showed them how to tune the guitar, so they tuned it themselves until it sounded “right” – which usually meant, had a musical sound –and what they ended up with was an open chord, the simplest altered tuning.

Purists say the guitar has only one “proper” tuning. Ignore them. I once took a guitar into a shop for repair, and that guitar happened to be in an open tuning. I was told by the ignoramus behind the counter that guitars were meant to be played only in one tuning. Wrong! What matters is the music you make, not how you make it. When Moses came down from the mountain with the stone tablets, there wasn’t an eleventh commandment that said, “Thou shalt tune E A D G B E.”

An open tuning is one where the strings have been tuned to the notes of a major or minor chord. This means that when you lay a finger across the neck, the barre creates another chord. The other fingers can then add notes to that
chord. In an open minor tuning, a major chord can be played by identifying the string(s) tuned to the third andputting a finger on that string one fret up.

Open major and minor tunings have certain things in common. For example, the chord on which the tuning is based will repeat itself at the 12th fret. Chord IV is played as a barre at the fifth fret, and chord V as a barre at the seventh. These, in combination with the open strings, will give you the three-chord trick. Minor open tunings are the same, except IV and V will be minor. The fifth, seventh and 12th frets will also provide resonant harmonics.

Open G – D G D G B D – is a popular tuning, favoured by Keith Richards, that is suited to both electric and acoustic uses. You can hear open G on ‘Blackbird’, ‘That’s The Way’ (a semitone lower at open Gb) and ‘Black Country Woman’. Since the root note is on the fifth string, some players don’t bother to tune the low E down to D but find it more useful to leave it as is. Another option would be to tune the bottom string up three semitones to G. A tone (whole step) higher, open G becomes open A – E A E A C# E – a tuning favoured by electric slide players. But be careful, as this increases tension on the neck.

Most songwriters want to hear what their songs would sound like played and recorded in a proper arrangement. The advent of the 4-track cassette recorder in the 1980s made it possible to experience the joys of multi-tracking without the expense of buying a reel-to-reel tape recorder (or booking studio time). Songwriters could make demos and mix them on a single portable machine.

Even though the sound quality left much to be desired, the 4-track cassette was a clever sketchpad. In the 1990s, the advent of digital hard-disk recording led to the first 8-track digital recorder/mixer. By 2000, for less than the cost of an old 8-track tape machine you could buy a digital mini-studio that combined 8-track recording, CD quality, editing, mixing and sound effects – all in one compact package.

Some musicians now record directly onto computers. If you are seriously interested in songwriting, I recommend that you make your own 8-track recordings in whatever medium – analogue or digital – suits your taste, wallet and available space. A couple of guitars, a drum machine and an electronic keyboard give a range of sounds and possibilities. Recording 8-track demos will improve your musicianship, teach you about production and arrangement, and sharpen your appreciation of the finer parts of songwriting.