Hi! I'm Ed Dowling from eddowling.com. I'm here to talk about string gages and open tunings on behalf of expertvillage.com. In the course of tuning your guitar to an open tuning, you're going to change the tension on the strings. On open E for example, we end up taking a concert tune guitar or a regular tune guitar, and winding this string up to more frets or one whole note. This one up 2 and this one up one. It's going to put extra tension on your nice solid spruce top, so in some cases, you may want to adjust string gages to the tuning. For open E, ultimately, the ultimate set if you start with a setup, concert strings that go from 11 to 52, we end up with 52, 40, 30, 23, 22, 15, and 11. That would be the ultimate open E tuning set. Strings; I buy 2 basic kinds, 11 to 52s and 10 to 50. If you're playing in tunings like open A, again, you use string gages very similar to the ones i just talked about, except you may go a lighter on the B. You may make a 4T and this G string may go to 22. Now, if you're playing in an open D or open G tuning, you're actually slacking the strings. In that case, we start with a regular tuning guitar that went 11 to 52, which I highly recommend for all acoustic guitars. You may end up in open D with this 11 being a 12. Your B string is also dropped, so that may become 6T. The 52 may be a 54. In fact, for open G and open D, you might just want to go to a set of 12 to 54 strings. If you just apply a...Start with your regular tuning. What's the regular gage of that string? Am I going to wind it up or lower it, and can I adjust my string gages accordingly? You usually can. You may end up buying 2 sets of strings and mixing and matching, or buying single string sets, or single strings at a music store to make up your own custom set of strings. For most purposes, a 11 to 52 will let you play beautiful open E. Open A tuning. You can also drop to D and drop to G using 11 to 52s and you can compensate from there. This is Ed Dowling signing off.
mom section
straddlecreek
Aug 02, 2008
