« Friends don’t let friends slamdance | Home | Oopsy-daisy »

Tooling around with open D minor tuning

One of the things I most dearly missed while away in Germany this past year was my assortment of guitars. I have one for everything: a flying V I tune down a whole step or to drop-C to play all the contemporary American metalcore and thrash revival stuff; a 7-string I keep either in standard or tuned up a halfstep, so I can jam with the Swedes; a beautiful Floyd Rose-equipped number that stays in a halfstep down, in tribute to the classics; and of course an acoustic, for netting the babes.

Without even an acoustic, I almost went mad, so bereft shredding was I.

Now I’m back in the States in a small apartment, and I’ve so far only brought an acoustic guitar with me. It’s not at all how I envisioned my homecoming, which was way more like the duel from Crossroads.

Not having guitars doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about them, though. In fact, quite the opposite: I’ve been chatting with metal friends constantly about jamming, and an interesting fellow I’ve had the good fortune of getting to know via the wonders of the internet recently proposed that we work on a musical collaboration. He lives in Greece, but will be moving to Sweden in a few months, at which point I’m sure I’ll lose him to the babes and shredding for which that nation is so rightly famous. So I’d best make the most of it now!

Check out Hermes’s piece called “Time Dissection” available on the MySpace for his project Mandrache. He describes the music as “Metal / Minimalist / Progressive.” I like.

During our conversations today, we started talking about stagnation as a result of too much opportunity. My deprivation period, if you will, in Germany, has very much motivated me to write again, something I’ve always wanted to do but never really bothered with. I had to starve myself to make myself hungry, essentially. We talked about how hardcore sucks, and about experimenting with different tunings, just for the sake of making everything fresh again. After all, Mikael did it.

So today I scooped up my acoustic, tuned it to open D minor, and tried to find chord shapes. Here’s what I came up with, three layers of improvisation.

My favorite part? At the end you can hear police sirens in the background, even though the windows of my apartment were shut when I recorded it. Ahh, Philadelphia. It’s good to be back!

Personally I’m not at all impressed with what came out during this improvisation, but the experience of playing was wonderful for me. I’ve always had a disease where I see music instead of hear it, which means that when I get a great riff idea, I usually experience it visually as a geometric pattern on the fretboard. Everything is shapes, not tone colors at all.

Playing in a new tuning, however, none of the shapes I knew and was familiar with made sense. For the first time since I can remember, I had to play based on how the chords sounded rather than how they felt in my hand. Groping my way awkwardly through oblique motion, I had to piece together melodic sense and rediscover tonality. It took about 40 seconds. I will never forget it.

The intervals between the higher strings, however, where the melody is played, were no different than standard tuning. Thus that melody was plodding and piecemeal, because I wasn’t trying anything new.

I am going to do more of this in the future.

A quick note about the title of this post: Hermes mentioned to me that in the outro to his “Time Dissection” (starts at 5:19, voiced by piano), he bases his phrasing on the Fibonacci sequence. Hopelessly nerdy, no? That’s why I love the guy. He also told me that Tool did something similar in Lateralus, which was completely believable to me, but certainly something I didn’t know. Unfortunately, I believe the guitarist from Tool used drop-D throughout that CD, and not open D or open D minor. So it’s not the best title. But it had a nice story to go along with it!

Update:

It should be noted that I was inspired to try this new tuning by my wonderful friend Sascha, whom I sorely miss. I was tired when I wrote this and never properly credited him for his influence in this. Wasn’t sure how to phrase it, then got distracted by tangents in my writing.

I miss you, man.