Music Hub › Guides › Instrument technique › Alternate Guitar Tunings: Drop D, Open Tunings and DADGAD

Why retune at all: what an open string frees up

In standard tuning, the guitar's six open strings never ring a complete chord: E-A-D-G-B-E mixes perfect fourths with a single major third, never lining up on the three notes of a full triad. Fretting notes on the neck with the fingers of the left hand therefore remains the only way to get almost any chord in open position. Retuning one or more strings changes that: it amounts to deciding, once and for all before a finger even touches the neck, which notes will ring without effort and which will still have to be found. An alternate tuning changes nothing about the guitar itself, neither the number of strings nor the fret spacing: it only redefines the resting pitch of each string, and therefore what harmonic material is available with no finger touching the neck at all.

What that frees up in practice depends on the scale of the change. The most discreet of the alternate tunings, drop D, touches only a single string and frees up a full power chord on the three lowest strings, playable with one barred finger instead of two. At the other end of the scale, an open tuning like Open D or Open G retunes all six strings so they already ring a full major chord open: strumming all six strings with nothing fretted gives a complete chord straight away, and a simple horizontal barre, anywhere on the neck, transposes that chord into any key without changing the finger shape. DADGAD takes a middle path, more modal than plainly major: the open strings ring a suspended chord, with no third, neither quite major nor minor, which opens up ambiguous harmonic colors much prized in modal and improvised music.

Beyond the chords themselves, the real transformation touches the instrument's resonance. A string tuned to ring a note of the current chord can stay open as a drone, a continuous pedal tone, while the fingers move higher up the neck to play a melody or another part of the chord: that open string vibrates freely, undamped by any finger, and also vibrates a little in sympathy with other strings that share nearby harmonics, which gives a sustain and a richness of tone that no fully fretted chord achieves. It is this texture, more than sheer ease of playing, that explains why so many very different styles, from Delta blues to Celtic music to grunge, each adopted their own tuning rather than making do with standard. The flip side, detailed tuning by tuning further in this guide, is that this free key in open position is only free in a single key at a time: getting out of it demands either a capo, or rethinking the fingerings entirely, or going back to standard.

Five tunings cover most of what modern guitar uses, from the closest to standard to the most radically different: drop D, Open D, Open G, DADGAD and Open C. The table below summarizes them before each gets its own section in detail.

A common yardstick helps compare these five tunings against each other: the number of strings that change pitch relative to standard, and in which direction. The higher that number, the further the tuning strays from standard, and the more both hands have to relearn new reference points on the neck.

Drop D: the gateway tuning, and what the quick take leaves out

Drop D changes exactly one thing relative to standard: the low E string drops a whole step down to become a D, giving, from lowest to highest, D-A-D-G-B-E. The guide on standard tuning already mentions it in passing, as the simplest gateway into alternate tunings; what it does not go into is exactly what that single step of difference changes in practice, both in history and in playing.

Contrary to a common assumption that ties drop D almost exclusively to 1990s rock, the very principle of lowering a bass string for fuller low end is far older than rock. Some modern guitar transcriptions of lute pieces by the English composer John Dowland, a Renaissance lutenist active at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries, actually call for drop D to get closer to the low tuning his scores assumed on the original instrument, even though Dowland himself never retuned a guitar. In rock, two songs from 1969 rank among the most often cited founding uses: The Beatles with I Want You (She's So Heavy) and Led Zeppelin with Moby Dick, both built on riffs that exploit the deeper bass the open D makes possible.

It was Seattle grunge, at the turn of the 1990s, though, that turned drop D into a reflex for a whole generation of guitarists. Chris Cornell, singer and guitarist of Soundgarden, remains the most often cited example: drop D let him barre power chords with a single finger on the three lowest strings, freeing up his left hand and making it easier to sing at the same time over odd-meter rhythms unusual for mainstream rock. Kurt Cobain of Nirvana and Jerry Cantrell of Alice in Chains, for their part, helped cement the same tuning across a whole swath of American alternative rock. Beyond that grunge core, drop D also runs through a good share of metal, where the power and heaviness of a riff matter as much as speed of execution, as well as certain corners of blues, fingerstyle folk, and even, more rarely, the classical guitar repertoire.

What drop D makes easy comes down entirely to that low D. A power chord on the three lowest strings becomes playable with a single barred finger, or even no finger at all when open on the D tonic, which frees up the other fingers to add notes, embellishments or passing dissonances while the bass stays steady. Sliding that same barre along the neck transposes the power chord into any key without changing the hand shape, a remarkably efficient move for chaining fast riffs.

What drop D complicates comes down to what does not change: the other five strings stay in standard position, so most of the usual open chords, especially ones that use the open low E, like an open-position E major or E minor, now ring a wrong note on that string if you keep playing it open without thinking. Playing alongside another guitarist who stayed in standard tuning remains broadly possible, unlike the open tunings covered further on, because five strings out of six have not moved; you simply have to keep in mind, at all times, that the sixth string no longer rings what it used to, and avoid letting it ring open in a chord that does not expect it.

Open tunings, a family of their own: the shared principle

Beyond drop D, five strings retuned at once open up a different family, that of open tunings in the strict sense: every string is retuned so that all six strings played open, with no finger touching the neck, already ring a complete chord. The principle is to spread the three notes of a triad, the root, the third and the fifth, across the six strings, often doubling certain notes at different octaves to keep the tuning still relatively close to standard in overall tension.

The word open, literally that, refers precisely to this chord obtained on the open strings, with no finger pressure at all. The principle is nothing specific to the modern guitar: it descends directly from the five-string banjo traditions of Black musicians in the southern United States in the 19th century, where a similar tuning already circulated under the name banjo tuning before it was adopted by guitarists. This banjo-to-guitar lineage, documented notably through the playing of the traditional musician Dink Roberts in North Carolina, partly explains why so many open tunings today carry names inherited from a practice far older than the electric blues or the rock that later made them famous.

Not all open tunings resemble each other in their harmonic construction, though. The three most widespread, Open D, Open G and Open C, each detailed in its own section further on, include a third, which makes them true major triads, as clean and complete to the ear as a chord played by hand. DADGAD, by contrast, belongs to a different logic: its open strings ring only a root, a fourth and a fifth, with no third at all, which produces a suspended, ambiguous chord, neither plainly major nor plainly minor. This structural difference is not a theoretical footnote: it fundamentally changes what kind of music each tuning best serves, a major triad naturally calling for sharper-edged harmonies and blues or rock-style playing, a suspended chord instead opening onto modal sonorities and freer improvisation with no imposed tonal direction.

Open D: the voice of slide and Delta blues

Open D retunes the six strings to D-A-D-F♯-A-D: the root repeats three times, the fifth twice and the major third once, which gives, strummed open, a D major triad of unusual richness, with several strings doubling the same note at different pitches. Four strings move relative to standard, all downward: the low E string and the high E string each drop a whole step down to D, the B string drops a whole step down to A, and the G string drops only a half step down to F♯. The A and D strings, already correct for the target chord, stay unchanged.

This tuning carries a name much older than electric blues: in the 19th century it circulated under the name Vestapol, after a parlor guitar piece hugely popular in the 1850s, whose performance already rested on this same open chord. It was in the very early 20th century, in the Mississippi Delta, that Open D took the turn that still defines it today: acoustic blues guitarists found in it an ideal ground for bottleneck playing, that bottle neck or metal tube slid over a finger to make the strings sing without fretting them. Robert Johnson was among the guitarists who alternated between Open D and Open G depending on the song; his 1936 version of I Believe I'll Dust My Broom is generally attributed to Open E, the twin tuning to Open D transposed a whole step higher, though the exact tuning of that particular recording remains debated for lack of certainty about the original playback speed of the 78 rpm disc. It was Elmore James's 1951 electric cover, which became one of the most influential versions of the song, that this time adopted Open D directly, and that did much to make this tuning the signature sound of amplified electric slide in postwar blues.

What Open D makes easy comes down to the very nature of bottleneck playing: laying the metal tube flat across any fret, with no particular pressing effort, immediately rings a complete D major triad across all six strings, and sliding it along the neck transposes that chord into any key with no finger needing to fret anything behind the slide. Playing with bare fingers, without a slide, draws on the same principle for acoustic blues turns of phrase where the bass and a simple melody sit easily together, the bass often staying open while the fingers trace a melodic line higher up.

What Open D complicates starts with the chord vocabulary itself: the open shapes learned in standard tuning, C, G, D or E in open position, no longer correspond to anything once the four strings have moved, and entirely different shapes have to be relearned for any chord that is not the base D major. Getting a minor chord in open position takes an extra conscious move, since the major third rings by default on several strings at once: it has to be either lowered a half step with a finger or avoided altogether, which makes minor keys noticeably less immediate than the tuning's native D major. Playing with a guitarist who stayed in standard finally requires constantly keeping in mind that four strings out of six no longer ring what they used to, a far bigger gap than drop D's single string.

Open G: the Spanish tuning, Robert Johnson, and Keith Richards's five-string invention

Open G retunes the six strings to D-G-D-G-B-D: three strings drop a whole step relative to standard, the low E string down to D, the A string down to G, and the high E string down to D, while the D, G and B strings stay unchanged, already correct for the target G major chord. Strummed open, the whole thing rings a complete G major triad, with the fifth repeated three times at different octaves, the root doubled and the third present once.

The historical name of this tuning, Spanish tuning, has nothing to do with Spain: it comes from a guitar piece titled Spanish Fandango, published in the mid-19th century and already built on this open chord, a tune so popular that nineteen different arrangements of it were published before the century was out. The same configuration also carried, in the banjo traditions of the southern United States, the name banjo tuning, attested as early as the 19th century among traditional musicians such as Dink Roberts. At the turn of the 20th century, Open G became one of the pillars of acoustic blues and bottleneck playing, alongside Open D: Robert Johnson used it on several of his best-known songs, in arrangements that gave the illusion of two guitarists playing together.

Open G had a second turning point in the late 1960s, this time in rock, when Keith Richards, guitarist of the Rolling Stones, picked it up while jamming with guitarist Ry Cooder. Richards did not simply take over the tuning as it was: he removed the low E string outright, the lowest of the six, keeping only five strings, G-D-G-B-D. This five-string version, directly inspired by the banjo that gave the tuning its historical name, clears space in the low end for the band's bass instead of crowding it, and shaped Richards's playing on Rolling Stones staples like Honky Tonk Women, Brown Sugar and Start Me Up.

What Open G makes easy closely resembles Open D in principle: a horizontal barre, with or without a slide, transposes the G major chord anywhere on the neck, and blues turns of phrase that alternate a triad with a dominant seventh are often playable with a bare minimum of fingers, one or two enough for many progressions. The five-string version popularized by Keith Richards adds a further advantage: without the lowest string, the guitarist can play riffs that sit more cleanly on top of a bass line played by another musician, without risking needlessly duplicating the same root note in the low end.

What Open G complicates carries over the same limits as Open D: the standard chord shapes no longer exist as such, a minor chord requires consciously lowering the third, and Keith Richards's five-string version simply gives up access to the instrument's lowest note altogether, a tonal choice that cannot be undone without putting a sixth string back on.

DADGAD: from the Moroccan oud to modern Celtic music

DADGAD retunes the six strings to D-A-D-G-A-D: three strings drop a whole step relative to standard, the low E string and the high E string down to D, and the B string down to A, while the A, D and G strings stay unchanged. Strummed open, the whole thing rings neither a D major nor a D minor but a suspended D-G-A chord, a root, a fourth and a fifth with no third at all, a deliberately ambiguous color the ear perceives as open and unresolved.

The history of this tuning is more recent and far better documented than that of the blues tunings: it comes down almost entirely to a single British guitarist, Davy Graham, who worked it out in the early 1960s while traveling in Morocco. Inspired by the playing of the oud musicians he heard there, an eleven-string instrument of the lute family traditionally tuned in fourths, Graham looked for a guitar tuning able to get closer to that sound and follow more easily the music he was discovering there. According to folk guitarist John Renbourn's account, Graham was already playing this tuning in public soon after returning from Tangier, and his 1963 version of the traditional song She Moved Through The Fair, broadcast on British television on the show Hullabaloo, is often cited as DADGAD's first great public showcase.

The British folk revival of the 1960s and 1970s quickly adopted this tuning, championed notably by guitarists like Martin Carthy, before it became a pillar of modern Celtic music, Irish and Scottish in particular, where its fourths-and-fifths sonority pairs naturally with traditional modal melodies played on fiddle or bagpipes. French fingerstyle guitarist Pierre Bensusan has made it his near-exclusive signature since the 1970s, demonstrating the harmonic range this suspended tuning can cover well beyond the Celtic repertoire alone. DADGAD also made its way into rock: Jimmy Page, guitarist of Led Zeppelin, used it on songs like Kashmir and Black Mountain Side, proof that this modal sonority born of a trip to Morocco eventually spread into styles far removed from the folk scene that first adopted it.

What DADGAD makes easy comes down to its suspended nature more than to any sharply defined chord: the open strings act as a harmonic pedal under melodies played higher up the neck, an approach particularly suited to fingerstyle and to solo arrangements of traditional melodies, since the bass and the underlying harmony keep ringing while the fingers trace an almost independent melodic line. Harmonies built in fourths and fifths, rather than thirds, also open up unusual voicings, closer to certain non-Western modal musics than to the classical harmonic language of standard-tuned guitar.

What DADGAD complicates comes down precisely to that missing third: getting a plainly major or minor chord requires adding the third with an extra finger, which makes this tuning less immediate than Open D or Open G for harmonically sharp-edged repertoire, classic blues or pop-rock for instance. As with the open tunings, playing alongside a guitarist who stayed in standard requires constant vigilance, since three strings out of six no longer ring the same note.

Open C: John Fahey's suspended color, and the exception that goes up

Open C retunes the six strings to C-G-C-G-C-E: the low E string drops a full major third down to C, the A string drops a whole step down to G, and the D string drops a whole step down to C, while the G string stays unchanged. The B string, for its part, does not drop: it rises a half step up to C, and the high E string also stays unchanged. Strummed open, the whole thing rings a complete C major triad, with the root repeated three times.

Less widespread than Open D or Open G in traditional blues, Open C owes most of its renown to American guitarist John Fahey, a founding figure of the so-called American Primitive style in the 1960s, an instrumental fingerstyle that drew as much on acoustic blues as on art music and modal musics. His piece Sunflower River Blues, on the album Death Chants, Breakdowns & Military Waltzes released in 1964, remains an often-cited reference for illustrating the hypnotic alternating basses this tuning allows. Jimmy Page also explored variants close to Open C: on Poor Tom, recorded in 1970 during the Led Zeppelin III sessions but left unreleased until it came out on the album Coda in 1982, he uses a C-A-C-G-C-E tuning, a variant that swaps the low G string of classic Open C for an A, proof that this whole family of tunings built around C has several close but distinct variants of its own.

A frequent mix-up deserves clearing up here, precisely because it is almost never explained clearly elsewhere: the tuning English singer-guitarist Nick Drake uses on the 1972 album Pink Moon, often presented as plain Open C, is not exactly that. His configuration, C-G-C-F-C-E, swaps the middle G string of classic Open C for an F, which introduces a fourth instead of a fifth and breaks the purity of the major triad, giving it a more suspended color, in some respects closer to DADGAD than to true Open C. This configuration, sometimes called Nick Drake tuning to set it apart, shows just how much small variations on the same base tuning can completely change the harmonic color obtained open.

What Open C makes easy stems from its unusual low-end density: with the E string dropped a full third down to C, the instrument gains a bass depth that neither Open D nor Open G reaches, ideal for atmospheric fingerstyle arrangements where alternating or pedal basses support a higher melody. The C major triad, obtained open across three different octaves of the same root, also gives a particularly full resonance as soon as all six strings are strummed together.

What Open C complicates starts with finger stretch: because several bass strings have dropped a great deal, certain intervals between neighboring strings widen relative to standard, which calls for left-hand stretches a little different from those learned elsewhere. This tuning is also the only one of the five covered in this guide where a string, the second, gains tension instead of losing it, a point distinctive enough to deserve its own section, right after this one, on mechanical tension.

Mechanical tension: what pulls on the neck when you retune

The guide on standard tuning details the full physics of a string, its tension, its vibrating length and its mass per unit length, formalized in the 17th century by Mersenne's laws: a string's frequency varies with the square root of its tension, which means, in practice, that it takes far more than doubling the tension to double the perceived pitch. What matters here is the scale of the change each alternate tuning imposes on that tension, string by string and across the whole neck.

Dropping a string by a single half step reduces its tension by around eleven to twelve percent; dropping a whole step, meaning two half steps, reduces it by around twenty to twenty-two percent, because tension varies with the square of the frequency and the effect of a frequency drop compounds more than proportionally. Conversely, raising a string a half step brings it that much faster toward its breaking point. Of the five tunings in this guide, four only lower strings, drop D, Open D, Open G and DADGAD, which systematically reduces the total tension on the neck relative to standard. Open C is the exception: three strings drop, but the second string rises a half step, making it the only one of the five tunings where at least one string moves closer to its breaking point rather than further from it, even though the combined drop across the other three strings generally remains larger than the rise of that single string.

This drop or rise in tension has a direct effect on the neck, independent of any risk of breakage. The truss rod, that metal rod housed inside the neck, normally counterbalances the forward pull the strings exert on the wood; reducing that pull, by switching to a lower tuning, leaves the neck free to straighten a little more than usual, which can change the neck's curvature, the relief measured at the middle of the neck, and therefore the string height above the frets. This imbalance is generally too small to notice over a one-off session or a single song played in alternation with standard: the neck wood has a certain elastic tolerance, and most guitars are set up with enough margin to absorb an occasional change. The calculation changes completely for a guitar kept permanently in an alternate tuning, for instance a second guitar dedicated exclusively to Open D or Open G: the average tension applied to the neck over several weeks or months settles into a new, lasting balance, and that is precisely the case where checking, and if needed adjusting, the truss rod becomes relevant rather than optional.

The nut, at the other end of the neck, also feels the effect of this tension change, but in the opposite direction: a string whose tension increases bites harder into its slot, which speeds up wear on the nut and brings that string closer to its breaking point if the slot is already a little worn or has the slightest burr. A string whose tension decreases, conversely, risks almost nothing at the nut, but its extra slack can make it vibrate with a wider swing, which promotes buzzing against the frets if the action or neck relief has not been adjusted to match. It is this asymmetry, a rising tension weakens the nut and the string, a falling tension instead weakens the cleanliness of the sound, that explains why the points to watch differ depending on whether a string is lowered or raised.

Getting back to standard tuning without breaking a string or unsettling the instrument

The principle that best protects the instrument when changing tuning, in either direction, comes down to a single idea: never bring a single string all the way to its final note at once while the others are still at their old pitch. Spreading the change across small steps over every string involved, a bit like tightening the lug nuts of a wheel in a star pattern rather than one at a time all the way, keeps part of the neck from sitting, even for a few seconds, under very uneven tension between strings already retuned and others not yet touched.

For a string that needs to go up, which is systematically the case for every string coming back to standard from drop D, Open D, Open G or DADGAD, the method stays exactly the one that applies to standard tuning itself: always approach the final note from below. Dropping the string slightly under the target pitch, then bringing it up slowly to meet it, stabilizes the tuning mechanically far better than forcing it straight up to the note from too low a pitch, since a tuning machine always has a little play that lets a string tightened from above settle back down. For a string that instead needs to come down, which applies to the second string of Open C coming back from C to B, the risk of breakage nearly disappears altogether: loosening a string remains, by far, the least risky move for it, with the real vigilance falling instead on the strings that had been raised, not the ones returning to a lower tension.

Once standard tuning is back, a quick pass across the whole neck, a few chords fretted in different positions rather than just strumming open strings, catches any buzzing or any pitch that may have drifted during the change, without requiring a bridge intonation check: unlike a change of string gauge or fitting a capo, a plain tuning change alters neither the vibrating length of the strings nor the fret positions, so the intonation set up in standard remains valid once you are back in it.

Switching several times a session between standard and an alternate tuning, which happens routinely in rehearsal when several songs in the same set call for different tunings, remains perfectly manageable for a well set-up guitar, particularly with locking tuners that limit the string slipping around the post at each change. It is mainly on an instrument with worn tuning machines or a poorly cut nut that frequent back-and-forth switching speeds up wear, the string having to find a new equilibrium point each time in a slot already under strain, a phenomenon all the more pronounced on the strings that travel the greatest tension distance, such as Open C's low E string, which travels a full major third in one direction or the other on every round trip.

The partial capo: a faster alternative, but a different one

The partial capo, which clamps down only certain strings while leaving the others ringing freely open, simulates part of the effect sought in an open tuning without ever touching a single tuning machine. Placing a partial capo across just two or three strings, leaving the others at their standard pitch, brings out drone notes in the middle of otherwise ordinary chords, a harmonic color close to what an open tuning naturally produces open. The guide on the capo covers its mechanics, its different types and its full history; here it is enough to note the direct comparison with the tunings in this guide.

The key difference lies in how far the effect reaches across the neck. An open or modal tuning like Open D, Open G or DADGAD stays available along the whole length of the neck: a barre at the twelfth fret rings the same kind of complete chord as a barre at the second, since it is the relationship between the strings itself that has changed. A partial capo, by contrast, only produces its effect at the exact spot where it sits: moving the capo changes the overall key, but the particular relationship between clamped and free strings stays confined to that one fret, without the portability a real tuning change offers across the whole neck.

In practice, a partial capo suits a one-off experiment better, a color wanted for a single passage or a single song in a set otherwise played in standard, without wanting to go through the whole retuning procedure and without risking any extra tension on the nut or the neck. A real alternate tuning, on the other hand, is justified as soon as a whole song, or several songs in a row, rely on that same open-string sound from lowest to highest, at which point repositioning a partial capo for every new chord would quickly become more cumbersome than simply retuning the instrument once and for all.

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