Well, Catters, it's been a long weekend. I have played so much, and tried so many new ideas, my left hand fingers are positively painful as I return to the office today. I thought the callouses on my fingers were so thick I was immune to it – I can usually play all night without feeling the slightest soreness, so you can guess how much I've been working at it!

As suggested, I've tried alternative tunings (DADGAD & Drop D); alternate & partial chord shapes / voicings further up the neck; playing melody on bass strings (haven't quite got the knack of intermediate treble string notes sounding right yet…); G Scales; capo on 2nd fret across top 5 strings; etc etc.

Think I bored my wife to death yesterday afternoon e.g. showing her the totally different sound of a D chord in std vs a D chord in DADGAD. Wow that D bass and voicing! Even the subtlety of the difference in sound between the A's on the 2nd & 3rd strings due to the 1 wound, 1 plain strings.

Just to experiment further, I even tried tuning the whole standard tuning down a whole 2 semitones (i.e. DGCFAD) to give a D on 1st string, whilst keeping std chord shapes……

You folks have really got me thinking!!!!

BTW M. Ted, I'm intrigued by your comments about 3 basic closed position scales that you can play anywhere up the neck that all really come out of G scale, and in your later post about each chord position being a universe of its own ref G E A and D – haven't got my head round those ones yet. Would you care to expand on them?

Mooh, I also took your idea of a fretboard map a bit further. What I'm part way through doing is making a fretboard map that you can key in any tuning for each string; key in what key you want to play in, and it will show you – on 6 separate guitar necks - all the notes of the root, IV & V major chords and the relative minors of each of those majors. Not quite complete yet (give me a couple more days), but if anyone is interested in a copy of it, PM me your e mail address, and when it's finished I'll send it to you (it's actually MS Excel based!).

I also looked a bit more closely at the melody & where high and low notes occur within the chords for just a few of the favourite songs that my wife and I sing. I found out that a lot of them are over an octave, and up to a full octave and a half, with widely varying chords used for the lowest and highest notes, e.g.:

-        No Man's Land (or Green Fields of France) by Eric Bogle – play in key of G; lowest note A (within Am chord); highest note D (within G chord);

-        Only Our Rivers Run Free – play in key of C; lowest note G (within G chord); highest note D (within F6 chord);

-        Fields of Gold by Eva Cassidy / Sting – play in key of A (G Capo'd up 2); lowest note A (within A chord – G shape capo'd up 2); highest note C# (within A chord – G shape capo'd up 2);

-        The Town I loved so Well – play in key of A (again G capo'd up 2); lowest note A (within A chord – G shape capo'd up 2); highest note D (within D chord and also Bm chord – respectively C and Am capo'd up 2);
        
-        Bonnie Maid of Fife (by Nick Keir of the McCalmans) – play in key of D (C capo'd up 2); lowest note A (within F#m - Em capo'd up 2); highest note B (within G chord – F shape capo'd up 2).

(Sorry if my choice of songs puts some of you off this thread... but I'm trying to illustrate the point of different chords used to suit similar tonal ranges….)

So, given Grab's comment, because of the range being over a full octave, I may need to also give some thought to switching between melody an low strings and melody on high strings within the same song …… Certainly, that idea never occurred to me as workable before – I guess I had a pre-conceived idea that it would sound kind of inconsistent. Must give it a try soon.

I reckon I've learned a truly huge amount this weekend, and I've only just scratched the surface of what you folks have suggested.

I've got the thirst for knowledge big style, and suddenly, the excitement of learning new tricks is there all over again, after a gap of probably 15 years of merely playing new songs the same old ways…

Thanks again 'Catters – you really are a fantastic source of inspiration!

Rgds

OF