Thank you so much for sharing this wonderful discovery with us! It’s so rare to find new tunings that are exciting but don’t make us relearn the fretboard! It’s in a way similar to the re-entrant tuning in Banjos and Ukuleles that make them sound so distinctive and unique…
I went and saw the video you mentioned and it’s brilliant. But I like your version much better, because you get a whole step between the E and D string, but also whole steps between A, G and B strings and one high e string for the melody. This is gonna keep me entertained for weeks! Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!
I like that, I also the thing Ella described in the video you mentioned but yours reminds me more of the clusters I live su much on the piano and as a trombone player in the section
Oh... this makes it easier to try almost immediately. Just swap out the two bottom strings without needing to change the nut and 4 strings. I"m thinking that your interpretation of the inverted tuning may be somewhat easier to adapt to. One can still play melodically on the 1st through 4th strings, and the way you're moving chords around sounds amazing!!! Very cool! Thanks SO much for sharing this discovery. I just may have to keep a guitar in this tuning as well. So happy!
I think I would call this "lo-fi" tuning because it kinda has this converging/diverging note chords thing going on like lo-fi music does, which sounds really sweet and subtle with a sort of nostalgic ambiance to it as well. In fact, I have another idea for your guitar, but IDK how it would work. Either way, you think about it and let me know: Low BEA from a 7 string, but up an octave, combined with high GBE from a 6 string. Or make it GCF. Or maybe even take the highs and bring them down an octave for even more interlacing of notes. Idea 2 is to do the same thing, but with 5ths instead of a guitar's normal 4ths.
This was so amazing, Timothy! I'm definitely going to do this to one of my tele's. And it's so sweet how happy you get and how that come across in this video. All the best. Kim, Norway
All those close cluster seem to be more accessible, like a pianist. Yours reminded me of Herbie in the second quintet a bit. I might try this as I always have found it frustrating that the normal tuning voicings are pretty linear, or need big stretches for those rubs. Even then you might only get one or two of those clusters whereas a pianist could have as many as they have fingers I guess. Just the sound of you playing your normal beautiful stuff is already bringing that to life in a way that wasn't as evident to my ears as I'm less experienced in that world of sound. It feels like those sounds have been right there all along and aren't necessarily in fact from another planet!
Colors! It really is beautiful Tim. I don't quite understand this yet; cause I'm having trouble eniugh in standard turning...though, music to me is all about colors and how we paint them. And, there's no instrument in the workd that can paint and mix colors like the guitar❤
respect. I'm only just restarting my exploration of guitar after playing a number of different styles for many years. I watched Elle and RJ on the Rhett post myself earlier this week. I also felt the inspiration from the new approach. Continued success man.
Tim that was awesome amazing it had me smiling hearing the chords so jazzy and beautiful color choices Wow thank you...i wonder if u can play lead lines or over the chords ❤❤i would love to try that ??
This would be amazing for this type of chordal approach in a baritone guitar. If you used B-B or A-A with those 2 strings up an octave from standard, you could really get into a piano-like lower register with clusters of notes, and it would work on a Fender scale length guitar instead of the longer baritone scale. Might have to change the nut though.
Hi Tim. I experimented with lowering strings 1 & 2 down an octave a few years ago. You get a similar effect but you keep the bass strings intact. Instant Bill Evans!
@@LorentzHaugen Yes. That’s what is thought of as the conventional string numbering: smaller the string, smaller the number. Larger the string, larger the number.
And another thing Tim , to me there is no wrong with discovering interesting tunings. Sometimes you have to throw them out , but I like what and where you’ve gone with this idea. I may take one of my other guitars and explore. This kind of ideas spark my interest because I don’t play much anymore. So I can pretend that I’m a beginner again. Or course for me I always feel like beginner because I’m a little bit of a remedial learner ( slow ) . Nothing wrong with that , but it is still a stigma out there . I love going into the unknown and discover something new in playing guitar.
I can see a lot of musical scenarios where the cluster tuning could totally work esp with acoustic guitar. Interesting options with two guitars (standars and cluster). Singer Songwriter, Irish Trad, acoustic country ... way more usable than Nashville tuning!
Nice sounds! 2 years ago I bought 3 concert ukuleles for similar reasons. 3 because I tuned them in C, Db and D to get nice chord shapes for most keys. The C-tuning from low to high is g-c-e-a, but the g is 1 octave higher, so it's just 1 whole step below the a. I only use them for chord playing. Ir's very nice to have different chord shapes containing the same notes, but they sound different because with down strokes you hit these notes in different places. Example: Fj7 is 5-4-1-0 or 2-4-1-3, the first is c-e-f-a, the second is a-e-f-c. You can change the sound of the strummed chord within a measure. Also I like the sound of the high tuning. Will try your inversed tuning on guitar! Kind regards from Austria!
This is really lovely, I was very impressed with the "original" but this seems more immediately accessible to me. It also leaves the upper 4 strings for conventional single note work
This is very interesting. Thank you for sharing your tuning. With this tuning, maybe you miss all the bass register, but what the heck.. you don't lose the scalar playability of the high register of standard tuning and you gain some tasty spices to add with the 'low' strings. A must to check out! And if you play in a band, the bass player will be pleased to have more room😂
Great idea! 👏👏 Thank you so much! What if tuning all the strings down a major second? This way the D and G strings used for the bottom strings wouldn't be tunned a major second higher, they would be used at their regular tension and pitch.
Interesting. It ends up sounding somewhat similar, in an inverted kind of way, to the so-called Half-Nashville tuning which I have on an acoustic baritone, where the D and G strings are pitched one octave higher. I'll have to try this.
In the 1980’s I had a student that was going to MI. He told me that Paul Gilbert came one day to school with a guitar that he had tuned sort of like this.
With inverted Tuning you get beautiful "pianistic" chords but it's difficult for single note improvising (I suppose you'd need a double neck guitar with one neck tuned to Standard Tuning for that)... same thing with Nashville Tuning (which some transpose in order to bring it down to a lower register) but with your version of it, Timothy, you can easily play single note solos at least on the top 4 strings, which is great! As a chord-cluster lover myself, I came up with my own cluster tuning in 1995 and have been developing it since. Obviously, I eventually had to give up Standard Tuning, "remap" the whole fretboard, forget the old and learn the new... but my tuning allows for single note soloing aswell (on all 6 strings with higher pitches remaining mostly on higher strings). I'm not a real, "pro" youtuber, but, if curious, you can checkout my demoing it on my channel. Cheers, Francesco.
Your tuning reminds me of ukulele tuning. The standard C6 tuning is called reentrant tuning because strings 1 2 3 descend in pitch but string 4 jumps back up to the G which is between the pitch of string 1 (A) and string 2 (E). it's called high-g tuning. Another popular tuning is low-g where the pitch linearly descends all the way through string 4. Ukulele historians don't seem to know why the Hawaiians tuned their ukes reentrant. Maybe, like you, they found the sound more pleasing. (I should mention that Canadian tuning is D6, which is 1 step higher than USA tuning, but it also is usually reentrant.) It seems that about half of ukulele players prefer low-G and half like high-g. Many probably have more than one uke so they can have one of each tuning and choose according to the song they play.
Have any of you tried Gambale tuning? I’m going to string a guitar with it on Monday and am excited to try it. All this tuning talk reminded me that I wanted to try it.
It's a beautiful solution to a challenge on the guitar for getting close voicings without have to stretch one's fingers or having to learn a different set of chord fingerings. It seems to me this is a variation on "Reentrant" tunings, that date back centuries. One of the other things that can be done is to play fast scale lines, but finger them like arpeggios, which results in a gorgeous Harp-like effect. Magical Here's a good example of Reentrant Tuning played on the Baroque Guitar: ua-cam.com/video/vJPVS_uZitI/v-deo.html
So Tim , if I’m understanding this concept right, you moved the two highest strings to where ? I did a lot of open tuning experiments when I was first learning the guitar and only played strings in those day . I met this other female guitarist named Pat Geffell , who was the wife of a good friend of mine . She was part of duo named Heaven and Earth. Pat and I hit it off and we would show each other these open tunings that we discovered. Pat mostly was teaching me . We had so much fun exchanging these ideas . Neither one of us play much or perform these days .
Tim, this approach to the tuning is by far the most compelling to me. Thank you for sharing. I have a technical question. Do you find that using a D and G string tuned to E and A compensates for the tension enough for intonation? Or will there be some more experimentation there for you?
So. To throw another curve…this sounds wonderful as a solo guitarist. But in an ensemble do you think the sound would be effective when competing for space in the listeners ear? Would all those nuances be lost where there is a bass player and drummer ? And what happens to those beautiful clusters when the volume goes up and you start to get overdriven sound? Very “Evans-esque “ in sound, but he was most effective I think in trio setting so that he owned the mid range. Finally, how effective do you think this tuning would be behind a singer when playing primarily comp chords? I have enough guitars that I think I will move one to this tuning and see where I can use it Thanks for sparking another search for creativity and novel sound. Even today it is possible to discover something new. Shal
@@TimLerchGuitar Me, too..But I like your variation much better after viewing the videos by Rhett and RJ and think it will be far more useful for me.. So, THANK YOU for the happy accident....S
Wait, are you switching out the strings or just tuning them up an octave or two? I'm thinking the latter, but I don't want to accidentally mess up my guitar.
No, I only use. D and G strings in place of the low E andA and those two strings were a smaller gauge than the nut was cut for, but they work just fine with no modifications. But if you want to do Ella’s running a nut flip would be necessary.
I'm really puzzled about the whole thing. Is this the right way: you swapped the strings that would normally go in the middle (D, G), and moved those to the top two string positions, AND THEN you took the top strings (E, A) and moved those to the center? And then left the B and high E strings where they were, then tuned it as standard tuning?
It’s much simpler than that. The top four strings are the same as they always are. I replace the bottom, two strings with strings which are smaller gauge, and I pitched them up one octave. so the low E and A strings, which are taken off and replaced by two strings, which are one octave higher than each of them. It turns out the the D and G strings from a fresh set work perfectly.
Oh , so you did move actual strings, then tuned them in the octaves? I’ll have to watch and listen to this more than once . This my second go round. And it is pretty.
Thank you! Thought I was the only one? Did you figure this out? I just watched this right now.... Do you literally move the d and g string to a and e 5th and 6th?
It does just make ya want to giggle with joy😁! Inside out/upside down… surprising… perfect🙌😁. Beautiful, and accessible👍😁!
Joy is a gift, and a wonderful thing.
Absolutely gorgeous sounding!🎶🎸👩❤️👨
Thank you so much for sharing this wonderful discovery with us! It’s so rare to find new tunings that are exciting but don’t make us relearn the fretboard! It’s in a way similar to the re-entrant tuning in Banjos and Ukuleles that make them sound so distinctive and unique…
I went and saw the video you mentioned and it’s brilliant. But I like your version much better, because you get a whole step between the E and D string, but also whole steps between A, G and B strings and one high e string for the melody. This is gonna keep me entertained for weeks! Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!
I like that, I also the thing Ella described in the video you mentioned but yours reminds me more of the clusters I live su much on the piano and as a trombone player in the section
Oh... this makes it easier to try almost immediately. Just swap out the two bottom strings without needing to change the nut and 4 strings. I"m thinking that your interpretation of the inverted tuning may be somewhat easier to adapt to. One can still play melodically on the 1st through 4th strings, and the way you're moving chords around sounds amazing!!! Very cool! Thanks SO much for sharing this discovery. I just may have to keep a guitar in this tuning as well. So happy!
I think I would call this "lo-fi" tuning because it kinda has this converging/diverging note chords thing going on like lo-fi music does, which sounds really sweet and subtle with a sort of nostalgic ambiance to it as well. In fact, I have another idea for your guitar, but IDK how it would work. Either way, you think about it and let me know:
Low BEA from a 7 string, but up an octave, combined with high GBE from a 6 string. Or make it GCF. Or maybe even take the highs and bring them down an octave for even more interlacing of notes.
Idea 2 is to do the same thing, but with 5ths instead of a guitar's normal 4ths.
I’ve always used the harpmonics as well. I can’t wait to try this out. It’s an amazing concept!
Lovely sound tim
This was so amazing, Timothy! I'm definitely going to do this to one of my tele's. And it's so sweet how happy you get and how that come across in this video. All the best. Kim, Norway
Wow! Love the clusters/close voicings possible. Thanks for the beautiful music Tim
Man, I’m glad I just stumbled onto this!
Very warm in its overall tonality. Thank you for sharing your discoveries.
All those close cluster seem to be more accessible, like a pianist. Yours reminded me of Herbie in the second quintet a bit. I might try this as I always have found it frustrating that the normal tuning voicings are pretty linear, or need big stretches for those rubs. Even then you might only get one or two of those clusters whereas a pianist could have as many as they have fingers I guess. Just the sound of you playing your normal beautiful stuff is already bringing that to life in a way that wasn't as evident to my ears as I'm less experienced in that world of sound. It feels like those sounds have been right there all along and aren't necessarily in fact from another planet!
What a charming sound! Thanks so much Tim. Always something really worth hearing on your channel and your passion is such an inspiration.
Colors! It really is beautiful Tim. I don't quite understand this yet; cause I'm having trouble eniugh in standard turning...though, music to me is all about colors and how we paint them. And, there's no instrument in the workd that can paint and mix colors like the guitar❤
respect.
I'm only just restarting my exploration of guitar after playing a number of different styles for many years. I watched Elle and RJ on the Rhett post myself earlier this week. I also felt the inspiration from the new approach. Continued success man.
Ella would be honored. Beautiful stuff sir.
How fun and beautiful! Thank you for sharing this inverted adventure. It’s so rewarding to find these ideas that make us smile
Awesome Tim. Also reminds me of Pat Metheny’s Nashville tuning on a baritone guitar.
Tim that was awesome amazing it had me smiling hearing the chords so jazzy and beautiful color choices Wow thank you...i wonder if u can play lead lines or over the chords ❤❤i would love to try that ??
This would be amazing for this type of chordal approach in a baritone guitar. If you used B-B or A-A with those 2 strings up an octave from standard, you could really get into a piano-like lower register with clusters of notes, and it would work on a Fender scale length guitar instead of the longer baritone scale. Might have to change the nut though.
Holy crap! How cool is this?! Just wow...
this makes me remember sitting in Joe's room with you, Nelson and Tico... bless ya.❤
Ted Greene is looking down very impressed! Btw, I ordered your giant sips mug as I’m a coffee drinker.
I saw Rhett's video, but now I am sold. Have to try that!
Hi Tim. I experimented with lowering strings 1 & 2 down an octave a few years ago. You get a similar effect but you keep the bass strings intact. Instant Bill Evans!
1st and 2nd meaning the high strings?
@@LorentzHaugen Yes. That’s what is thought of as the conventional string numbering: smaller the string, smaller the number. Larger the string, larger the number.
@@JazzRockswithAdam Yeah, thanks!
I LOVE this, Tim!! What a great discovery!
And another thing Tim , to me there is no wrong with discovering interesting tunings. Sometimes you have to throw them out , but I like what and where you’ve gone with this idea. I may take one of my other guitars and explore. This kind of ideas spark my interest because I don’t play much anymore. So I can pretend that I’m a beginner again.
Or course for me I always feel like beginner because I’m a little bit of a remedial learner ( slow ) . Nothing wrong with that , but it is still a stigma out there . I love going into the unknown and discover something new in playing guitar.
I can see a lot of musical scenarios where the cluster tuning could totally work esp with acoustic guitar. Interesting options with two guitars (standars and cluster). Singer Songwriter, Irish Trad, acoustic country ... way more usable than Nashville tuning!
Nice sounds! 2 years ago I bought 3 concert ukuleles for similar reasons. 3 because I tuned them in C, Db and D to get nice chord shapes for most keys. The C-tuning from low to high is g-c-e-a, but the g is 1 octave higher, so it's just 1 whole step below the a.
I only use them for chord playing. Ir's very nice to have different chord shapes containing the same notes, but they sound different because with down strokes you hit these notes in different places. Example:
Fj7 is 5-4-1-0 or 2-4-1-3, the first is c-e-f-a, the second is a-e-f-c. You can change the sound of the strummed chord within a measure. Also I like the sound of the high tuning.
Will try your inversed tuning on guitar!
Kind regards from Austria!
This is really lovely, I was very impressed with the "original" but this seems more immediately accessible to me. It also leaves the upper 4 strings for conventional single note work
Truly wonderful, Tim…thanks for sharing!
This is very interesting. Thank you for sharing your tuning. With this tuning, maybe you miss all the bass register, but what the heck.. you don't lose the scalar playability of the high register of standard tuning and you gain some tasty spices to add with the 'low' strings. A must to check out! And if you play in a band, the bass player will be pleased to have more room😂
я думал вы пропали, слава Богу, вы вернулись. Привет из России!!!
Man, that is beautiful
Lovely Tim
Great idea! 👏👏 Thank you so much! What if tuning all the strings down a major second? This way the D and G strings used for the bottom strings wouldn't be tunned a major second higher, they would be used at their regular tension and pitch.
Sounds magical!
Interesting. It ends up sounding somewhat similar, in an inverted kind of way, to the so-called Half-Nashville tuning which I have on an acoustic baritone, where the D and G strings are pitched one octave higher. I'll have to try this.
In the 1980’s I had a student that was going to MI. He told me that Paul Gilbert came one day to school with a guitar that he had tuned sort of like this.
With inverted Tuning you get beautiful "pianistic" chords but it's difficult for single note improvising (I suppose you'd need a double neck guitar with one neck tuned to Standard Tuning for that)... same thing with Nashville Tuning (which some transpose in order to bring it down to a lower register) but with your version of it, Timothy, you can easily play single note solos at least on the top 4 strings, which is great! As a chord-cluster lover myself, I came up with my own cluster tuning in 1995 and have been developing it since. Obviously, I eventually had to give up Standard Tuning, "remap" the whole fretboard, forget the old and learn the new... but my tuning allows for single note soloing aswell (on all 6 strings with higher pitches remaining mostly on higher strings). I'm not a real, "pro" youtuber, but, if curious, you can checkout my demoing it on my channel. Cheers, Francesco.
Sounds wonderful and all chord shapes are the same,I have to try it,thanks....
Amazing playing and tone as always
Thanks a lot!
That mistake is fantastic. Congratulations!
Not quite Nashville tuning, as I understand it. Nashville tuning raises all of the lower 4 up an octave. This version only raises the bottom 2.
Yeah, Nashville tuning gets a quasi 12-string sound when you double the same part in standard tuning.
Your tuning is good ,because it reminds me of Ted Greene's playing.
Your tuning reminds me of ukulele tuning. The standard C6 tuning is called reentrant tuning because strings 1 2 3 descend in pitch but string 4 jumps back up to the G which is between the pitch of string 1 (A) and string 2 (E). it's called high-g tuning. Another popular tuning is low-g where the pitch linearly descends all the way through string 4. Ukulele historians don't seem to know why the Hawaiians tuned their ukes reentrant. Maybe, like you, they found the sound more pleasing. (I should mention that Canadian tuning is D6, which is 1 step higher than USA tuning, but it also is usually reentrant.) It seems that about half of ukulele players prefer low-G and half like high-g. Many probably have more than one uke so they can have one of each tuning and choose according to the song they play.
Tim, I think you stumbled onto something wonderful. Keep going with it.
Are you familiar with Metheny's baritone special tuning? Similar effect.
Have any of you tried Gambale tuning? I’m going to string a guitar with it on Monday and am excited to try it. All this tuning talk reminded me that I wanted to try it.
I have tried it and its very interesting.
It's a beautiful solution to a challenge on the guitar for getting close voicings without have to stretch one's fingers or having to learn a different set of chord fingerings. It seems to me this is a variation on "Reentrant" tunings, that date back centuries. One of the other things that can be done is to play fast scale lines, but finger them like arpeggios, which results in a gorgeous Harp-like effect. Magical
Here's a good example of Reentrant Tuning played on the Baroque Guitar: ua-cam.com/video/vJPVS_uZitI/v-deo.html
So Tim , if I’m understanding this concept right, you moved the two highest strings to where ? I did a lot of open tuning experiments when I was first learning the guitar and only played strings in those day . I met this other female guitarist named Pat Geffell , who was the wife of a good friend of mine . She was part of duo named Heaven and Earth. Pat and I hit it off and we would show each other these open tunings that we discovered. Pat mostly was teaching me . We had so much fun exchanging these ideas . Neither one of us play much or perform these days .
All I’m doing is replacing the low E and Low A with thinner strings and tuning them to E and A an octave higher than usual.
@@TimLerchGuitar Thank you Tim , I got it now . And you discovered something that the rest of us need to explore !
Tim, this approach to the tuning is by far the most compelling to me. Thank you for sharing. I have a technical question. Do you find that using a D and G string tuned to E and A compensates for the tension enough for intonation? Or will there be some more experimentation there for you?
It seems to intonate well so far, if I decide to keep this tuning on this guitar I’ll fine tune it.
👏👏👏
Might be cool with a 7 string and a normal low E (or a)
So. To throw another curve…this sounds wonderful as a solo guitarist. But in an ensemble do you think the sound would be effective when competing for space in the listeners ear? Would all those nuances be lost where there is a bass player and drummer ? And what happens to those beautiful clusters when the volume goes up and you start to get overdriven sound? Very “Evans-esque “ in sound, but he was most effective I think in trio setting so that he owned the mid range. Finally, how effective do you think this tuning would be behind a singer when playing primarily comp chords?
I have enough guitars that I think I will move one to this tuning and see where I can use it
Thanks for sparking another search for creativity and novel sound. Even today it is possible to discover something new. Shal
I’m going to have to try it out in a group and see how it goes.
@@TimLerchGuitar Me, too..But I like your variation much better after viewing the videos by Rhett and RJ and think it will be far more useful for me.. So, THANK YOU for the happy accident....S
Wait, are you switching out the strings or just tuning them up an octave or two? I'm thinking the latter, but I don't want to accidentally mess up my guitar.
I switch out the strings I use the D and G string from an 11 set to replace the low E and A.
This is wonderful. Tim did you also flip the nut to compensate for the different string sizes?
No, I only use. D and G strings in place of the low E andA and those two strings were a smaller gauge than the nut was cut for, but they work just fine with no modifications. But if you want to do Ella’s running a nut flip would be necessary.
@@TimLerchGuitar thank-you!
I'm really puzzled about the whole thing. Is this the right way: you swapped the strings that would normally go in the middle (D, G), and moved those to the top two string positions, AND THEN you took the top strings (E, A) and moved those to the center? And then left the B and high E strings where they were, then tuned it as standard tuning?
It’s much simpler than that. The top four strings are the same as they always are. I replace the bottom, two strings with strings which are smaller gauge, and I pitched them up one octave. so the low E and A strings, which are taken off and replaced by two strings, which are one octave higher than each of them. It turns out the the D and G strings from a fresh set work perfectly.
@@TimLerchGuitar Thanks Tim! I'm gonna have to try this. It sounds pretty amazing in your demonstrations.
great! I'll test with an 8 string guitar here: I'll use the two lowest strings for the real low notes.. EAeadgbe'
Oh , so you did move actual strings, then tuned them in the octaves? I’ll have to watch and listen to this more than once . This my second go round. And it is pretty.
Thank you! Thought I was the only one? Did you figure this out? I just watched this right now....
Do you literally move the d and g string to a and e 5th and 6th?
soooooooooooo pretty...
Isn’t that a version of Nashville tuning?
Sounds gorgeous BUT. If you are a reader you are going to sound wrong reading charts I guess.
This is a specialty tuning not intended to replace the conventional tuning.
Who said the guitar, religiously has to be ; EADGBE ?
Sorta gets into Bill Evans territory, I must try it too !