| Tuesday, May 09, 2006 |
| DADGAD |
I feel like I've learnt a whole new instrument over the last two weeks. It looks suspiciously like my regular guitar, but it certainly doesn't feel that way. After reading a magazine article about 'DADGAD tuning', a method of re-tuning the guitar to give a great loud acoustic sound, I thought I'd give it a go. 5 minutes later I had it all setup and found a couple of great chord charts to get me started. This one was the best: DADGAD pdf
It was strange starting again knowing no chords and having to learn everything from scratch. I was playing the next day with a few friends and it was a real challenge to get to a place where I knew enough chords to play all the songs we were doing. You can play most of the usual chords in the key of D with one finger. These same chords, plus a few others give you the keys of A and G. Chords like C and E don't sound that great, so I've started using a capo and transposing on the spot if I need to play those chords a lot, which adds a whole extra challenge.
If you play an instrument, especially the guitar, you might be asking... "Why bother? Sounds like you're giving yourself a pointless headache!" Well, part of it is that I just like to push myself musically, to aim to improve and try new things. But the main reason is the article I read said that this tuning lets you play a lot more chords with less fingers than with traditional tuning. So, these open chords make the guitar sound much louder that usual, which is a big bonus if you're playing acoustically. This is what tempted me to give it a go - and it sure works. |
posted by Mike & Helen @ 8:59 PM   |
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