The Journey to Open G

A week ago or so, I was in my backyard on our patio playing my guitar and trying some ideas to come up with a new song. There are several ways I try to get the juices flowing and sometimes I have an idea already mulling around in my head that is trying to get out through my fingers. Of course, I was in standard tuning (E-A-D-G-B-E) and trying various chords and combinations. Many times I come across something that sounds like another song I have heard and I will try to figure that out before getting back to finding my own thing. It happens that sometimes I have to do that before getting on with my own creativity as the other song will constantly be in my head crowding out all other ideas. This happened to me years ago and led to the way I play Greensleeves/What Child Is This? to this day. Prompted by the song by Richie Blackmore’s Rainbow off their live album called 16th Century Greensleeves, I played a Dm and went, “Huh, that sounds familiar…” Now I have a cool version for myself!

Like most, I typically stay in standard tuning and just work out the fingerings for the chords as I go. This time, I came up with a cool sounding line but it wasn’t quite there. As I kept working with it, removing notes and adding notes at strategic points, a nice sounding start of a song based off of the D chord began to form. Ok, but the general sound was missing something like a deep bass note. My initial thought was just adding a low D with my bass when I went to record it but I wanted to see what it would sound like, <insert voice from Veruca Salt from the 1971 Willy Wonka movie> Now! Easy solution: tune my E string to D and, Wah lah! instant bass note to go with my D chord. Too bad I don’t have or play a harp guitar, right?

Even better sounding song but I wanted to grab a bit of a melody line or something to give it some movement as I played. Now the fingering was getting a bit complicated. I have long fingers but not that long! I was plucking the low D with my thumb and working out a rolling picking pattern on the higher strings mixing in the melody line – no small feat. I had created a song I couldn’t play dangit…

Well, how about going full open tuning? The idea usually comes with a quick reaction from my brain, “Uh, yeah. Now all the notes will be in places you don’t expect. That’ll be just greeeaaat…” I couldn’t think of another way around it as I continued to struggle with just a drop D tuning. I have recording software on my iPad that would allow me record eight channels and layer everything right there in the backyard but I thought I should just try it first.

Open G tuning goes like this: D-G-D-G-B-D (low to high). Notice that only three strings actually need to change. Not as daunting as you would think. Now, to try my new song… After a bit of fiddling around to reorient myself with the locations of the notes I had previously worked out, the song did become much easier to play! However, there is still the challenge of the finger picking pattern…that still needs some practice. It would be easy to just grab my pick and strum the thing but where’s the fun in that? I had a pretty song emerging and a challenge to improve or work off the rust in my finger-picking – Not bad!