From: owner-wanderer-digest@smoe.org (wanderer-digest) To: wanderer-digest@smoe.org Subject: wanderer-digest V2 #22 Reply-To: wanderer@smoe.org Sender: owner-wanderer-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-wanderer-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk wanderer-digest Thursday, March 21 2002 Volume 02 : Number 022 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: Family of Tunings [Howard ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 19 Mar 2002 19:31:37 +0000 From: Howard Subject: Re: Family of Tunings Hi all, (finally catching up on my email...!) Jim - some really interesting points and questions raised there. I think many of us are aware of patterns and relationships between chord shapes - either consciously or subconsciously. Apart from anything else, it often gives a simple way to remember things by relating them to other chords/ideas that you've come across before. One of the great things about music in general is that you so often stumble across interesting patterns of notes or chords. I hadn't actually spotted the reason for the connection between the open G and open D tunings - you explain why it works very nicely! Some of the similar shapes that I had spotted are things like this: In open D: 000000, 020100, 040300, 050300 This is a nice sequence of chords (used in quite a few Joni songs). The equivalent in open G: x00000, x02010, x04030, x05030 Other than this, I can't say I've noticed other relations that apply "across the strings" as you put it - though there may well be other examples of this kind of thing. As for working in new tunings. If it's a Joni tuning, I just try to pick out notes of the chord from the song, so in a sense I'm guided towards certain chord shapes by whatever Joni plays. If I'm just fooling around in a new tuning, I just follow my instincts and see what happens! Sometimes you can come across a nice chord by accident, sometimes you can hear what you want in your head - then you have to work out how to play the chord. However you approach it, I think that being forced into "unfamiliar" territory with a new tuning is good as it makes it harder to rely on familiar shapes, and forces you to rediscover your instrument - and it's at times like this that you sometimes stumble on totally new sounds and ideas. That's part of the magic of altered tunings! regards, Howard Jim McCarthy wrote: > > Greetings fellow Wanderers - > > This fascinating thread forced me out of 'lurkdom' to make a simple point > that maybe most(?) of you have already caught onto. Many years ago when I > first ventured into open tunings for Joni's music and others, I discovered > that any chord shape played on the highest (treble) five strings in Open > G (DGDGBD, or D57543) works just perfectly if played on the lowest (bass) > five strings in Open D (DADF#AD, or D75435). Viewed numerically using the > Joni "tuning family" notation under discussion now, the reason behind the > empirical discovery I made is clear: in open G, the highest five strings > are _G7543, while in open D, the lowest five strings are D7543_. Cool, eh? > > My question for the group (especially for those [you know who you are :-] > who blaze trails for the rest of us through the previously uncharted > territory of Joni's unique tunings) is to ask whether you already make > use of "chord family" relations like this "across the strings" (instead > of up and down the strings as in x75435 all being related via a capo) to > take what you already know from a treble (bass) string quartet or quintet > and apply that knowledge to a related bass (treble) string subset in an > unfamiliar tuning ? > > What other pairs of tunings Joni uses frequently are related like this ? > > Or do you work from "scratch", so to speak, building up chord shapes in > an unfamiliar tuning after first figuring out the notes in the scale(s) ? > (Ouch! -my brain hurts just thinking about how laborious that would be, at > least for me ... years back, I wrote a computer program to accomplish the > labor for me, producing chord shapes for any chord in any tuning as a tool > for working from the sheet music guitar chord names [shapes in standard > tuning being worthless] into whatever open tuning I wanted to try when > learning a song ... I still don't have the "ear" to do this a better way). > > Thanks in advance for the insights ! > > Jim McCarthy > ____________________ > > M.Russell@iaea.org wrote: > > > > there are at least some families that are more related to each other by > > the top notes - the best examples being Cold Blue Steel and related songs > > (x77543), and Circle Game and related songs (x57543), for which the chord > > shapes are almost interchangeable or only have small differences. > > ------------------------------ End of wanderer-digest V2 #22 *****************************