i went down to the crossroads

February 5, 2017 in Graphics, Lectures Without Words, Music

at least one stranger “liked” last week’s
hell hound on my trail, so here’s another
guitar-neck diagram in the same format.

this one’s in “open G” tuning: DGDGBD
(“dog dug bed”). in key-neutral notation
one has 0-5-12-17-21-24 (“half steps” above
the lowest note). (the thing to memorize
here is probably the gaps-between-strings:
5, 7; 5, 4, 3 [“twelve & twelve”; there are
(of course) 12 half-steps… guitar frets
or piano keys for example… in an “octave”];
in the same notation, the “open D” tuning
from the previous slide would be “7,5;4,3,5”.)

adding “7” (and reducing mod-12 again) gives us
7-0-7-0-4-7; the point of this admittedly rather
weird-looking move is that the “tonic note”
for the open chord (“G” in the dog-dug-bed
notation) is placed at the “zero” for the system.
(“open D” is 0-7-0-4-7-0 in this format; the
tonic note falls on the high and low strings.)

my source informs me that open-G tuning is also
known as “spanish” tuning; a little experience
shows me that it’s even more convenient for
noodling-about-on-three-strings. that is all.

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