“I use open and alternate tunings to get music out of the guitar,” says fingerstyle master Martin Simpson. “Do you want to move people? You can’t be struggling with holding down the damn strings. Alternate tunings can help you unlock chords and melodies that might be difficult or impossible to play in standard tuning.”
With its evocative and enigmatic sound, DADGAD is one of the guitar’s best-kept secrets. Blues and folk guitarists often delve into open D (low to high, D A D F# A D) and open G (low to high, D G D G B D) tunings, but only the most intrepid pickers investigate DADGAD.
Yet Simpson, one of the world’s preeminent DADGAD players, insists that it’s not a difficult tuning.
“Actually, it’s quite easy to get gorgeous sounds,” he says. “I’ll show you two ways to approach DADGAD, but first, just listen to the open strings.”
These open strings are shown, from low to high, in FIGURE 1. To move from standard tuning to DADGAD, simply drop the first and with strings down a whole step to D, and then lower the second string, B, a whole step, to A.
FIGURE 1
“DADGAD’s open A, D and G strings are the same as in standard tuning! That means 50 percent of this tuning is completely familiar to you.”
—Martin Simpson
DEMYSTIFYING DADGAD
“The first thing you’ll notice,” says Simpson, “is that DADGAD is neither major nor minor—you can go either way. Open-D and open-G tunings push you in a particular harmonic direction, whereas DADGAD is delightfully ambiguous. To play songs, you need I, IV and V chords, right? In DADGAD, you can play rich harmony by merely fretting one note with your index finger [FIGURE 2].
FIGURE