Re: Alternate Guitar Tunings (OT)

["Per Boysen" <perboysen@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Dec 14, 2008 at 1:46 PM, Krispen Hartung
<info@krispenhartung.com> wrote:
> I love tuning my guitar in stacked minor or major seconds...makes for 
>some
> very interesting music and thinking outside the box...
>
> K-

Wow, that's advanced. Never tried that... yet. But I have practiced
"unusual" intervals in flute playing by using a continuous foot pedal
to transform pitch with varying grades of offset. In order to learn it
"as an instrument" you have to play with headphones that blocks out
the acoustic flute sound. So you're sort of feeds the brain with a
systematically recalculated pitch in regard to the usual outcome from
those instrument playing reflexes you have previously learned. It's
interesting to notice how this affects your musical instincts to come
up with new strategies for bringing out your expression.

With guitar I sometimes change tuning by ear. In the beginning this
was a practice to "tweak the tuning until it sounds inspiring" and
then play "not knowing the sounding notes"  in a mode of discovering
new chords. However, quite soon I discovered that I couldn't help
hearing what note each string hooked on to anyway. So I moved more
into using that technique as a tool for performing or composing. Like
if I have a certain passage in mind that may be hard to finger on a
guitar I may simply change the tuning. This is also something I
learned in order to meet certain demands form others when working as a
studio musician and having to play one particular thing just once but
in the best sounding way. Alternate tuning was one usual trick - other
tricks were "putting a match/chop stick/icecream stick on the nut to
soften attack and sustain for slide playing, gaffer taping to mute
strings that you don't play during a certain take, gaffer taping tiny
loud speakers to the guitar body to make a line-in guitar take sound
as played loudly in front of an amp, hanging small objects to the
strings to make them sound different (metal paper clips, wedding rings
etc etc).

Greetings from Sweden

Per Boysen
www.boysen.se (Swedish)
www.looproom.com (international)
www.ubetoo.com/Artist.taf?_ArtistId=6550