A little over a week ago, two guitarists that I’m always watching, Rj Ronquillo and Rhett Shull appeared playing with a tuning that was completely different than anything I had ever seen. And the inspiration came from Ella Feingold, who is an American guitarist known for a sensational rhythm guitar feel and for the types of chords, the unique voicings she achieves with this tuning! I thought that was all really cool and wanted to try it too!
I spent a morning doing some experiments and recorded some clips with ideas that came from this tuning! And there are two things that are especially interesting about this tuning. The first one, maybe you already noticed, is that the idea is not just to retune the strings, raise the tones of some, lower others, which would be the most common thing to do.
In this case, what we do is move the strings around! Check it out! It's practically reversing the order of the strings, except for D and G, which remain in the same places as before.
And the second is the most curious of all. Because despite changing the place of the strings, the guitar is still tuned to E, A, D, G, B and E, from top to bottom. Only, of course, in reverse orientation.
So it's not just playing in standard tuning, but upside down. i. e, it's not the same as what Eric Gales does, or Edgar Scandurra.
It's something else! Listen to it one more time: And that makes us able to use all the same shapes of chords and scales that we already know in standard tuning. They will all have the same notes, but the voicings change a lot!
So even playing super usual lines, the music that appears is something else and that makes a lot of ideas sprout! I exchanged some messages with Ella and she gave me some tips that can help balance the tensions and volumes of the strings in this inverted tuning. In a common set of strings, like this one, the string that would originally be tuned to B becomes an A, a tone lower, which reduces its firmness, and the string that would originally be an A, becomes a B, a tone higher and the tension goes up.
So Ella uses a hybrid set of strings, blending gauges from 010 and 011 sets to rebalance the tensions. Another things is that, as we invert low and high strings, they don't fit very well on the original nut. You can play without changing the nut.
This guitar here still has the original nut, it's alright. But the adjustments are not so good, especially in the height of the strings. So this guitar will get a new nut, specific to this tuning, which I'm planning to use more from now on, for arrangements and compositions, for when I need less traditional sounds, or simply need a bit of inspiration.
In fact it's a kind of thing that can make more sense if you have more than one guitar, because, even though it's a super interesting resource, it's also very specific! In any case, it pays off to at least try it because it's a lot of fun! If you try it, let me know in the comments, I want to know your impressions!
! And for those who are feeling generous and want to support the channel, I leave the link to my crowdfunding campaign in the description below, ok? See you in the next video!
So, bye!
