Donovan Banks wrote:
There is a Fleetwood Mac song called The Chain that uses drop D tuning.
Don't knock it. it is very effective.
John Mayer has dropped to C with Neon. Dropping a string or raising another is a very interesting experiment.
You can get great drone effects with altered tunings - things that you can't get any other way. It's having the 6th and 4th strings an octave apart. Not just drop-D. The Stephen Stills/Bruce Palmer tuning EEEEEBE (low to high) allows the same drone effect - again you have the octave pairs, actually two of them.
John Martyn often used DADGAD on electric guitars. Again the drone effect plus other possibilities that the altered inter-string intervals present. Keith Richards uses open G a LOT. Keef often uses 5 string guitars, but you can tune a 6 string to open G as well.
Open tunings often lend themselves to eastern sounding things, and the simple fact of having the guitar tuned differently, often with octave pairs, means that the whole instrument rings differently as strings ring in sympathy. Try the Stills/Palmer tuning and see how your guitar rings and rings.
