Subject: RE: Nic Jones article in The Guardian
From:
GUEST,Charles Macfarlane
Date: 02 Jul 12 - 10:02 AM
> The reason we use open tunings is that - the steel string acoustic is a weird instrument. Well guitars generally really.
Well, TBH that is really rather an unhelpful non-statement. There is nothing particularly weird about guitars whether steel, nylon, or gut strung and/or tuned open or standard.
> John Williams once remarked that - acoustic playing is about how the note decays and dies - whilst electric playing is about how the note sustains.
Yes, I think I can see what he's driving at.
> So electric players, by and large - like to use blocked off notes and chords where they can control and form the sustain with their fingers.
Well, I'm not really an electric player, but as a listener I don't think that's a very good description of Buddy Holly, Hank Marvin, Carlos Santana, Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, or Andy Summers, to name a few that spring immediately to mind.
> Acoustic players - be it classical, flamenco, blues, folk - they will elect to to use an open string which resonates and creates its own space, whenever possible.
Again, this seems to me to completely wrong. By far the majority of players learn to play in standard, and rarely if ever play anything different, many not even getting as far as tuning the bass down to D. This point is discussed further below.
> Most open tunings give you the low E string tuned down to a D. Adventurous souls like Marin Carthy, Nick Drake, Joni Mitchell like to use the E string tuned down to C. That's what the traddies never get. Martin, Nick and Joni - have much more in common with each other as musicians than you would believe - they are all really divergent thinkers - ignoring music theory and finding their own path. Think of the slides and thuds that you get with the Carthy guitar style - where does all that come from - broonzy, some Irish fiddler maybe. Totally eclectic.
> The EADGBE had a sort of Cromwellian straightforwardness that open tunings lack. No guitarist should deny himself the pleasures of both.
There is a very good, solid, practical reason for the standard tuning's popularity. It's the tuning that gives the easiest and most makeable chord shapes for the greatest number of keys. In a former world of gut, now replaced by nylon, strings, both of which take some time to respond fully to changes in tension, it was necessary to choose a tuning that gave the most flexibility for the least amount of time spent adjusting the tuning.
This is true not just of guitars. When I suggested to a well-established fiddle player that a tune such as the Da Foula Shaalds should really be played in hardanger tuning, she agreed in principle, but said that, having only one fiddle, it took too long for the instrument to settle down after changing the tuning for it to be practicable to retune just for one or two tunes.
But to return to guitars, structural changes to allow the use of steel strings have also made a huge change in the responsiveness of the instruments to changes in tuning, and it now becomes more achievable, though practicability is still an issue, to change tuning when playing live. Alternative tunings usually drop, or sometimes raise, a string by no more than a tone, and, provided suitably-guaged and good quality strings are being used anyway, that's usually not too bad, though I still think that many guitarists seem to spend more time tuning than actually playing, but when a string is altered by more, as in my own favourite Open C where the bass is down two whole tones, strings tend to slap when tuned down or snap when tuned up, and then having a second guitar becomes desirable.
There was an hilarious moment in a local folk club when a local performer was retuning his guitar, gingerly, and, as it turned out, wisely, backing his face away from the instrument: "The guy who showed me this tuning warned me that it breaks a log of third strings!", and just as he got the words out, twang, his third string broke!
For Open C, I used a specially set-up Aria, with a high action and the beafiest set of D'Addario strings that I could find locally, but for a while now these have only gone to 0.59 for the bass whereas really I'd've liked 0.60 or heavier, because they still slapped and buzzed, as you can hear from the very informal recording here, which is capoed up to D, making the buzzing worse (this is intended to be heard as an example of string slap, not the excellence or otherwise of my playing, or how to use an open tuning - it happens to be the only recording of the tune I have, and was made in the kitchen the evening I wrote it, simply so I wouldn't forget what I'd written next day - I lost a good many moments of inspiration like that, so I got into the habit of having a portable tape machine handy whenever I was mucking around on an instrument; consequently, at the time, I had no idea that it would be the only recording of it that I would ever make):
Sally In The Woods
So you can see that even with steel strings retuning and setting up is still an issue that deters many from experimenting with open tunings. In some ways this a pity, because they can produce a very beautiful sound, but in other ways, they can be seen as quite limiting. You can make Open C sound wonderful in C, but even capoing it up to D, you lose sustain, and I wouldn't choose to play in, say, G on it, because I don't like the D chords in the tuning. For G, I'd choose Open G, which has very similar fingering anyway.
Open tunings are particularly good for pentatonic traditional material, although they are by no means limited to such material - I used to do both Bob Dylan's "Love Minus Zero / No Limit" and Mary Chapin Carpenter's "Stones In The Road" in Open C capoed up to D.
If anyone wishes to explore the delights of Open C, there is a tutorial on my website:
Open C Tutorial
To answer some other points, any idea that open tunings are in some way 'cheating' is rubbish. It's a question of judgement and good taste as to what sounds better for the material you play.
I disagree also with Nic's self-criticism. Many of us tend to see the faults in what we do rather than the positive things, and heaven knows as a player I have many more of the former than he, but wannabee rocker or not, his playing changed everything for everyone that followed, and that is one hell of an accomplishment, the more so when one considers how much of his career was so tragically lost, and how difficult it is to obtain his recordings from the early part of his career.
Nic, if ever read this, and you'll allow an unknown but well-wishing admirer of your earlier peformances to advise, don't beat yourself up - haven't you've gone through enough already? Just allow yourself to think it's great that you are back, just the same as your countless admirers do.
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sj
