Alternative
Alternative ("alternate") tuning refers to any open-string note-arrangement other than standard tuning. Such alternative tuning arrangements offer different chord voicing and sonorities. Alternative tunings are common in folk music, where the guitar emulates indigenous instruments with distinct drones and sound. Alternative tunings necessarily change the chord shapes associated with standard tuning, which eases the playing of some non-standard chords at the cost of increasing the difficulty of some standard chords.
Some tunings are used for particular songs by professional musicians, and may be called after the song's title. There are hundreds of such tunings, which are often minor variants of established tunings. Fewer alternative tunings are used regularly by communities of guitarists, who share a musical tradition, such as American folk or Celtic folk music.
The hundreds of alternative tunings have been classified into a smaller number of categories: open, both major and minor (cross note), miscellaneous ("special"), modal, dropped, instrumental (based on other stringed instruments), and regular.
Read more about this topic: Guitar Tunings, Standard and Alternatives
Famous quotes containing the word alternative:
“If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?”
—Graham Greene (1904–1991)
“It is a secret from nobody that the famous random event is most likely to arise from those parts of the world where the old adage “There is no alternative to victory” retains a high degree of plausibility.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“No alternative to the
one-man path.”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)