Alternate tunings

[ubertar]

Thanks Mr. Possum, for tying it back together. I tune my oud: C F A D G C.

[PatrickBrown]

Hi ubertar, my pleasure, if I can assist. Yep, that's the oud tuning I started with.
Then I put the pesky A string in to G a step lower, and the F down a minor third to D, and the the sixth, which I should take off, to a barely audible G below that.
If you put a guitar or tenor banjo(sounds alot like a tar) in the C, G, C, F(CGCGCF for guitar, low to high) tuning and do thaats,,Bhairava, Kalyan, etc. you'll sound like Ravi or Khansahib in no time flat.
I have Anouar Brahem's Barzakh CD. He's awesome on that oud. You can tell where alot of Flamenco came from,,,North Africa. And I don't feel guilty picking my nylon string guitar.

[ubertar]

I have Anouar Brahem's Barzakh CD. He's awesome on that oud. You can tell where alot of Flamenco came from,,,North Africa. And I don't feel guilty picking my nylon string guitar.

Never heard of him... where's he from? I only know the old (and/or dead) guys, like Farid al Atrash, Hamza el Din, Raid al Soumbati, Mohammed Abdel Wahab, Monir Bashir...

The banjo idea sounds cool. I used to study sitar.

[PatrickBrown]

Brahem is from Tunisia. You can get the CD at Amazon. One of the hot new players, if you didn't know better, you'd think he was picking a guitar.
I have some Bashir. He's real good. Old school. Real Makam centered. If you've not heard Brahem, check him out. He's another kettle of fish entirely.
He's not just making the oud sound like a guitar. He's doing it great justice, IMO. Some very beautiful stuff that exploits the oud in a great way. Worth hearing. Barzakh.

[Rigsby]

Anour Brahem's Thimar is pretty nice too, with soprano saxophone (John Surman) and double bass (Dave Holland). Worth a listen, he's way lighter in tone than someone like Monir Bashir, the recordings obviously help with that, but i really wish ECM wouldn't go so over the top with the reverb.

[Antero]

My bassist does things on guitar with some strange tuning involving a lot of F#'s... I'll have to ask him for specifics tonight.

One I want to experiment with is tuning in thirds for some nice close interval chords, but I need to figure out the string tension issues.

[takeout]

DADGAD, Drop-D, and CGDGAD are my fallbacks. You can fake a good 12-string sound when the octaves are that easy to grab. Paging Mr. Young... Mr. Neil Young...

Come to think of it, I've been meaning to do some CSNY homework for a while now.

I tuned all strings to their closest E for a "feedback in the key of the song" track once; does that count?

[Devlars]

Here are a few that I use for different songs (all from lowest to highest):

E, G#, E, G#, B, E can be heard on Little Indian I also use this tuning for one of the softest and lush sounding songs we have (think Sun King) so it's proven to be a pretty versatile tuning for me. Also...

E, A#, D, G, B, E with a capo on the first fret

and another that I can't remember off the top of my head for the life of me but it's pretty cool. I have used the doubled guitar using octaves trick before and it does help to add definition when there's a lot going on in a track.

[Cojonesonasteek]

Oh shit, one more:

C G D G B D


Kinda an open G/C. Helps to have bigass strings.
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One of my longtime faves is a slight variation on TWL's tuning:

C G D G C D

[sonicanger]

I use a lot of the ones mentioned above, plus these:

CFCFAC - For when i get the urge to play"when the levee breaks"
DADF#AD capo 2nd - For some Smiths stuff (i.e. "That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore")
EBEEBE- For MBV style stuff