I had read that some bluegrass musicians tune their guitar strings to DADF#AD because it makes playing that style of music easier. But what does it sound like? This is the sound of each string being plucked and then an "open drop" strum, with no frets held down. It was synthesized using the program 'sox'.
If you have a UNIX machine (GNU/Linux, Apple MacOS) with sox installed, you can recreate the sound by running these commands:
sox -n pluck.wav synth pluck D2 pluck A2 pluck D3 pluck F#3 pluck A3 pluck D4 \
delay 0 .5 1 1.5 2 2.5 remix - fade h 0 5 1 norm -1
sox -n strum.wav synth pluck D2 pluck A2 pluck D3 pluck F#3 pluck A3 pluck D4 \
delay 0 .05 .1 .15 .2 .25 remix - fade h 0 4 .1 norm -1
sox pluck.wav strum.wav opendrop-bluegrass.wav
play opendrop-bluegrass.wav
Type
Wave (.wav)
Duration
0:09.000
File size
1.6 MB
Sample rate
48000.0 Hz
Bit depth
32 bit
Channels
Mono
Comments
2 years ago
@strangehorizon. Oh, interesting! As you can tell, I'm just learning. I'll have to look up how metal musicians tune their guitars. I had heard that Phrygian scales sound especially good in metal but hadn't thought about the tuning.
2 years ago
As a metal musician, I can tell you that plenty of people in every genre use this tuning. The F# string makes most of the difference, though I do like to flat it by 1 (making it an F) so that I can switch between minor and major chords by fretting 1 fret up on the F string. However, keeping it at F# enables easily reaching the G, which is better for most forms of modal playing.
