Open
An open tuning allows a chord to be played by strumming the strings when "open", or while fretting no strings. The base chord consists of at least 3 notes and may include all the strings or a subset. The tuning is named for the base chord when played open, typically a major chord, and all similar chords in the chromatic scale can then be played by barring exactly one fret. Open tunings are common in blues and folk music, and they are used in the playing of slide and bottleneck guitars. Ry Cooder uses open tunings when he plays slide guitar.
Read more about this topic: Guitar Tunings
Famous quotes containing the word open:
“For it is not possible to join serpentine wisdom with columbine innocency, except men know exactly all the conditions of the serpent: his baseness and going upon his belly, his volubility and lubricity, his envy and sting, and the rest; that is, all forms and natures of evil: for without this, virtue lieth open and unfenced.”
—Francis Bacon (1561–1626)
“The world is a puzzling place today. All these banks sending us credit cards, with our names on them. Well, we didn’t order any credit cards! We don’t spend what we don’t have. So we just cut them in half and throw them out, just as soon as we open them in the mail. Imagine a bank sending credit cards to two ladies over a hundred years old! What are those folks thinking?”
—Sarah Louise Delany (b. 1889)
“The open frontier, the hardships of homesteading from scratch, the wealth of natural resources, the whole vast challenge of a continent waiting to be exploited, combined to produce a prevailing materialism and an American drive bent as much, if not more, on money, property, and power than was true of the Old World from which we had fled.”
—Barbara Tuchman (1912–1989)