Why You Should Tune Your Guitar Down
Have you ever wondered how doom, djent, and metalcore bands manage to sound so heavy, even when playing relatively simple chords? Well, if you’re one of the uninitiated, welcome to the world of tuning down. There’s just something about a riff in C, B, or even A standard that makes everything else sound like it’s for wimps.
“But it’s annoying to keep tuning,” you say. “And it messes with my guitar's playability.” These are things to think about, but they aren't insurmountable problems. Here’s why you should tune down, and how to do it correctly.
What Are the Best Low Tunings?
Unless you’re brand new to music, you’re probably aware that the E standard tunings most people use for guitar and bass are pretty much just arbitrary notes that a lot of people thought sounded good for popular music a few hundred years ago. With an E-tuned fretboard, you can cover most of the music that’s ever been on the radio.
Perfect, right? Well, it’s perfect if you’re a go-with-the-grain kind of person. If you’re not, you probably appreciate the value in experimentation, uniqueness, and leading the pack. You’re a cool, majestic, scary wolf, and everybody else is a bunch of annoying, bleating sheep who love Katy Perry.
So now that that’s out of the way, let’s go over some of the most common low tunings and some bands that use them:
B standard eg. Electric Wizard
C standard eg. Sleep
D standard eg. Mastodon
Drop D eg. Lamb of God
Drop A eg. Elder
7/8 string tunings eg. Meshuggah
But what do these designations mean?
Standard” simply denotes that the tuning is just a modified version of the E tuning most people know and love. The note indicates the open position of the lowest string. In “drop” tunings, the lowest string is tuned down a full step, while the rest of the strings stay in their standard arrangement. To illustrate, drop D and E standard only have one string tuned differently.
Of course, you’re totally free to experiment with other alternatives, and some Youtube players have come up with some impressively unconventional tunings like, “DDDDDD.” I wouldn’t suggest this for beginners though.
Other arrangements can be a lot easier to play. The doom band Slomatics, for example, tunes their guitars to C#, except for the lowest string, which is tuned to F#, making the two lowest strings into an octave pair. This can open up certain riff patterns, and it gives the guitar a crushing bass sound.
Tuning, Tension, and Intonation
While downtuning is a good idea if you want to add weight and power to your playing, there are a few things you need to think about before you hit the road with your A#-tuned bass or guitar.
The first is that tuning down will naturally change your intonation. If you aren’t aware, intonation is the ability of your fretboard to play the notes you theoretically want to. Obviously, this is very important. Intonation is never perfect across the entire fretboard, but you should do your best to get it as precise as possible by dialing in your intonation adjustment screws along with a visual tuner.
Tension is another consideration to be aware of. Removing tension from your neck won’t hurt your instrument, but it can impact the shape of the neck if your tension is extremely low. Using higher gauge strings can help prevent major changes to your fretboard.
Because bass strings are bigger and stronger, this effect is often more pronounced with bass guitars. If you find that your neck is suddenly bent back, you should look up the proper truss rod adjustment and conservatively make changes.
One of the most annoying issues that can come with tuning changes is fret buzz. Because lower notes vibrate at lower frequencies, loose strings can slap against frets, causing irritating, tone-sucking buzz. Buzzing isn’t usually profound down to about C#, but after that, It can ramp up with each successive drop.
On the high end of your neck, you can fix buzzing by adjusting your string height. On the low end and in extreme cases, you may need to raise your nut or adjust your truss rod.
All of these changes might or might not seem worth it to you, but if you never tune down, you’ll never know how your guitar handles. Most likely, you’ll have little or nothing to worry about.
How Do You Avoid Adjusting Your Guitar All of the Time?
For a musician, there’s nothing quite as disheartening as hearing a really cool song you want to play, only to find out it’s in a totally different tuning. Sure, you can retune, but who has five minutes for that? If you have locking tuners, you might as well light your guitar on fire and buy another.
Fortunately, there’s a simple solution for this — keep another guitar for each tuning you play. Seriously. You won’t want to keep retuning, and having another instrument means you won’t have to. Most musicians have multiple guitars anyway, and cheap options for new ones are everywhere.
If you aren’t sure which axe you want to keep in which setup, consider this: the human ear is less capable of distinguishing detail at lower frequencies. For anything lower than about C standard, it can be tough to tell the difference between a 3000-dollar Gibson and a 200-dollar ripoff. Save that Gibson for the C-E range. Unless you have multiple Gibsons of course, in which case, maybe just buy a live-in guitar tech.
What Do You Do Once You’re All Set Up?
Playing a whole different set of notes can be challenging at first. You may notice that some of the riffs and patterns you used to play now sound terrible, while other ones sound better. Experiment and try different things. In general, playing slightly slower sounds better, but you’ll likely do this naturally, as deep notes simply lend themselves to slow playing.
And that’s it for today. Keep browsing Metablog for more metal music, art, history, and literature.