To only play your guitar in standard tuning is to severely limit the sound and possibilities you can get from the instrument. However, many players tend to avoid tunings other than standard falsely believing it's too hard. Gone are all the familiar shapes and patterns you spent so much time learning to visualise, leaving you with a fretboard that feels the way it did to you when you first picked up a guitar, or so it seems.

demon slayer rengoku The kind of tuning I want to look at today is open tunings. These are when you tune some of the strings of your guitar to certain notes so that when you strum them altogether they sound a chord.

For example, one very common tuning is open G tuning. To get your guitar tuned this way simply lower both the high and low E strings to D notes, and your 5th string to a G note. Once done, strum all your open strings together and you will have a G chord:

G chord = G B D

Open G tuning (low to high) = D G D G B D

* Strings that have been adjusted are in bold

There are in fact many varied tunings you can play your guitar in, you can even make up your own, including dropped tunings, modal, and instrumental.

It's way beyond the scope of this article to cover all these, so our focus will be with open tunings and 5 things you need to know, and can be doing right now, to sound great instantly when playing your guitar in an open tuning.

1. Forget The Notion That Different Tunings Means Learning Your Guitar All Over Again

Due to this one false belief, I avoided playing my guitar in any kind of alternate tuning for years. To me, it was enough keeping on top of standard tuning. I wasn't prepared to let go of all the common chord shapes and scale patterns I had come to know so well, for a completely new fretboard.

Unfortunately I had the view of many guitarists that learning to play your guitar in any kind of tuning, other than standard, means having to start all over from the beginning.

This just isn't true! So don't let it stop you, like it did me, from exploring the awesome, cool, and unique sounds available to you when playing in open tunings.

What you need to realise is that a lot of open tunings are closely related, not just to each other but to standard tuning too. Let's see how an open G tuning compares to standard tuning for example:

Standard Tuning - E A D G B E

Open G Tuning - D G D G B D

As you can see, 50% of standard tuning remains unchanged with only the 6th, 5th, and 1st strings being altered. Therefore, much of the fretboard will still be familiar to you.

What about tunings that aren't so closely related to standard? Well, keep in mind learning in an open tuning does not cause the technique you have already developed to play a guitar to disappear. So regardless of how the new tuning relates to standard, it can never be like having to start playing from scratch as you still have your technique, which is a big part of your guitar playing.

Furthermore, open tunings set your guitar up to actually make things EASIER to play, not harder. If you ever try to play something written in an open tuning, in standard tuning, you'll see exactly what I mean.