Open Tuning Part II - Here There Be Monsters
This is the second of two parts on open tuning. We’re going to learn how to put together a fretboard map and use it to figure out chords in open tuning.
And For Those Of You Who Want A Challenge?
This is my take on Shawn Colvin’s take on Every Little Thing She Does is Magic by the Police, done in open D tuning . The introduction consists of arpeggios of Dmaj7 (with the sixth (B) added) played over a walking bass line of G, A, G, D, which looks (and sounds) like this:
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And here’s a good place to make another note, tab is a great and useful tool, but one should never pass up the opportunity to learn how to read music. Yeah, I know-”So-and-so’s a bloody great guitarist and he can’t read music-blah, blah, blah.” All I’m saying is that anyone can live in a foreign country without speaking the language. But if you want the fullness of the experience, then buck up and learn to converse with the locals in their dialect. You’re likely to find the little things that occasionally slipped past you, like rhythm patterns.
Back to the song - The verses are a slight variation from the introduction, as you’ll see in the following example. For a bit of a dramatic flair, the verses close with a “turnaround,” starting with the open D and then shifting what would be an Amaj7 chord in standard tuning to get Em7 (xx2120) and Dmaj7 (004340) up the neck, using our standard tuning A chord shape on the fifth fret to get G (xx5550) and then coming back down again to the open D major chord. And because that doesn’t seem quite dramatic enough, let’s add another D major chord, produced with the 12th fret harmonics, as an exclamation point!
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