Alternative Tunings: Drop D, Drop C and Open Tunings

Why guitarists change the tuning

Standard EADGBE tuning is the starting point for almost everything played on guitar. But from the earliest centuries of the instrument, musicians discovered something fascinating: changing the tuning of one or more strings opens up a completely different territory. New harmonic possibilities, new textures, new ways of playing that simply do not exist in standard tuning.

Alternative tunings are not a trick or a shortcut. They are tools with their own logic, each designed — or discovered — to solve a specific musical problem or to create a sound that would otherwise be impossible or very difficult to achieve. Knowing them means expanding the vocabulary of the instrument.

Drop D: the closest to standard tuning

Drop D is the most common alternative tuning. The change is minimal: only the sixth string is lowered one tone, from E to D, giving the tuning D-A-D-G-B-E. That single change has two immediate consequences: greater low-end range (the sixth string reaches two semitones lower than standard E) and single-finger power chords (the three lowest strings form a perfect fifth plus octave, allowing them to be barred vertically with one finger).

Drop D is so close to standard tuning that most scale patterns and chord shapes work the same on the five upper strings. Only the sixth string needs a mental adjustment. This simplicity has made it the favorite of rock guitarists since the 1960s.

Drop C and other drop variants

Drop C applies the same logic as drop D but transposed one tone lower. The entire guitar is tuned down one tone (from EADGBE to DGCFAD) and the sixth string is lowered one additional tone to C, giving the tuning C-G-C-F-A-D. The result is a considerably lower and darker sound, characteristic of modern metal, metalcore and djent.

Other variants exist: drop B, drop A, and tunings with all strings lowered by several tones. The logic is always the same: lower the overall tuning for more low-end and lower the sixth string one additional tone to maintain single-finger power chords.

Open tunings: the guitar as a chord

Open tunings work in a completely different way: the six open strings produce a complete chord. This has enormous musical consequences. On one hand, it makes slide and bottleneck playing possible: sliding a glass or metal tube along the strings at any fret produces that same chord at a different pitch, which is the foundation of Delta blues and country slide. On the other, it allows full barre chords with a single finger at any fret.

The two most widely used open tunings are Open G (D-G-D-G-B-D), where the open strings form a G major chord — Keith Richards' tuning for Rolling Stones riffs and Robert Johnson's for Delta blues — and Open D (D-A-D-F#-A-D), where they form a D major chord, widely used in blues and folk and extensively explored by Joni Mitchell.

DADGAD: between open tuning and modal tuning

DADGAD (D-A-D-G-A-D) is not exactly an open tuning: the open strings form a suspended D chord, not a complete major chord. It was developed by British guitarist Davey Graham in the 1960s after a trip to Morocco, seeking to capture the sound of Arabic and Celtic music on the guitar. The result is a tuning with an ambiguous, ethereal modal character, a favorite of contemporary fingerstyle and present in the work of Pierre Bensusan and Jimmy Page.

What you gain and what you lose

Every alternative tuning is a trade-off. In drop D you gain low-end range and simple power chords, but chord shapes on the sixth string change. In open tunings you gain slide possibilities, open voicings and natural resonance, but you lose pattern uniformity: what works in one open tuning does not work in another.

This is one reason why many guitarists own several guitars tuned differently: changing tuning mid-performance is slow and risky, and having instruments dedicated to each tuning is the practical solution.

Related resources

On the Guitar Trainer platform you will find exercises specifically designed to help you get familiar with drop D and the most common open tunings, including adapted scale patterns and typical progressions for each tuning.

What comes next

You have seen that the guitar can be tuned in very different ways, each with its own universe of possibilities. But all those tunings — standard, drop D, open G, or DADGAD — share something fundamental: the fretboard as a system of semitones. In the next post we will explore precisely that: how the fret works as a semitone unit and how that simple mechanism defines the entire logic of the guitar fretboard.

I changed the tuning of my guitar and suddenly the instrument spoke to me in a language I did not know existed. — Joni Mitchell