For many years -- including a three year period during which I played and sang almost every waking hour and accomplished almost all of my development a player -- I played guitar in standard tuning ONLY. I had made a consicous decision to keep things simple and basic during my serious effort to make myself into a musician: no capo, no pick-switching (thumbpick & two fingerpicks, exclusively), no retuning.

I had perviously noodled around a bit in open tunings with a slide, playing the basic 12-bar chord pattern at the 5th and 7th frets plus the open chord, of course, and an occasional little slide from fret 2 to 3. Got pretty boring after a while, since I never learned any bare-fingered chords to go with it, nor any real songs with their own characteristic riffs. Then I quit even trying, and it's been 35+ years since...

ANYWAY: I recently searched out the tabs and started learning a favorite song played in open D ("Lakes of Pontchartrain," Paul Brady arrangement, as found here, ). I'm progressing nicely enough, and now I'm ready to try something else in the same tuning, so I can entertain myself and maybe learn a few things while practicing "Lakes" and without constantly retuning.

Any suggestions? At this point, I don't know *anything* about playing in any tuning except standard EADGBE, and learning even a few rudimentary chords would give me a start towards playing something more than one single (albeit excellent) song in this fairly popular tuning.