Guitar tunings

why a tight jar lid is much easier to remove when hot water is ran over it. This very same effect can be seen in guitars, particularly with their tuning. A guitarist will often find that when he or she leaves a guitar in places of varying temperatures that the guitar’s tuning is usually affected, sometimes dramatically. This can lead to an out of tune guitar when it comes time to…

Toyota - 34th Annual Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar Festival Music is as much a part of Hawaiian culture as the outrigger canoe and the Luau. In fact, from the battlefield to the beaches where feasts have long been held, music has been used to motivate and celebrate. No luau would be complete without a wide variety of Hawaiian slack guitar music. In Hawaiian, the word is "ki-ho'alu", which loosely translates into, "loosen the key" or the loose string style of playing a stringed instrument such as the…

When you consider the thousands of years between the first lutes and modern lutes, it’s actually quite remarkable how similar the lutes of the past are to more recent lutes (like the guitar and orchestral strings). We can learn a lot about Greco-Roman lutes by looking at their predecessors and descendants. The lute spread much like languages do. Just as regional dialects develop, so, it appears, did lute preferences. The lute did not develop linearly from Mesopotamia, through Greece, and…

Learning how to get faster guitar playing can be a challenge to anyone, especially if you do not understand an efficient manner to achieve faster speeds. It requires an enormous amount of dedication and, depending on the riff or song you are trying to learn, it could take a long time. However, if you understand how to spend your practice time efficiently, the results you are looking for can be reached in a matter of days. If you follow the method described in this article, you will most likely…

keep it a secret and have John Lennon pretend to be the one on the guitar. Tonight shouldn’t be any different, except it was. There was this reporter, John Didion, who has been on Django’s case for months now, determined to prove that Django is the true guitarist. So there Django was sitting backstage, waiting for the show to start in 30 minutes, when he hears yelling outside the door, Django panics, and hides under an extra large easy bake oven. John Didion burst through the door, when he…

Guitars are one of the most commonly played instruments, and everyone has a song they love because of its distinct guitar part. Guitars are played in many different ways from classical to heavy metal. In every way a guitar is played, different things can affect the tone and ability of it to play that certain style of music. Through history the talent of the guitar player is the ultimate way to create a style of music to a high level but the way it is built, the types of pickups used on it, and…

to tune the treble string as high as the string could handle. The lower strings were then tuned according to the treble string. This caused the normal tuning to be somewhere around G C F A D G or A D G B E A from the highest to lowest string which came to be known as the “old English lute tuning”. Somewhere in the mid 1500’s a seventh course was added in the bass on some lutes; although, the six course lute was still in…

There are six standard courses called by their English names the treble, small mean, great mean, counter-tenor, tenor, and bass. “There may be up to eight additional strings called bass courses or diapasons, which are usually arranged in a diatonic scale below the sixth course.” Like all stringed instruments during the Renaissance period the strings were made of dried gut and because of this the highest string, which had to be made of the thinnest gut, was “notorious” for breaking when played…

of any guitar player’s career is to properly tend to their guitar. Each time a guitar is tuned the strings stretch. The stretching of the strings eventually wears out the strings to the point where they cannot stay in tune anymore. Once this happens it is time to restring the guitar.In order to change the strings on an electric guitar that features a floyd rose type bridge, one must gather the tools and supplies, thread the strings and apply the necessary slack, and finally tune the guitar.…

The earliest versions of the stringed bass varied greatly in shape, size, tuning, playing techniques, and number of strings. Most of these issues were not agreed upon until early in the 20th century and some still persist today. Exploring the history of the bass we’ll discover how a simple hunting bow transitioned into the realm of music and spawned a new style of instrument that would eventually produce the modern day bass. We’ll examine the significant moments in the history of the bass to…