Open D Tuning - Six String Electric - Instructional Material for fretted music not slide ?

[Richard Alderson]

Went to see some blues last night and there was a European (Stefan Hellesheim), pretty much just shredding the blues for 60 minutes straight on lead guitar and vocals. At one point he pulled out a slide and added some Howling Wolf and Eric Clapton style bottleneck leads. I didn't see him adjust the tuning either before the song, nor afterward. I asked him about that after the set, and he said that his main tuning is Open D, even when he's not playing slide. He always plays his six string fretted guitar in Open D !; Makes me want to look up any instructional material for six string fretted guitar playing in Open D. I wonder if its too late in life to start learning a new set of chords. I can do the slide stuff, no problem, but I always played my bottleneck tunes on a square neck dobro 30 years ago, and never fretted when doing slide guitar. If anybody has seen instructional material for open E or open D, the fretted and finger scales aspect, please feel free to make any recommendations. I have seen the Arlen Roth text, which has 3 or 4 chords for use in Open E, but haven't seen anything else.

[Richard Sinkler]

I've seen open D guitar videos on YouTube. Not sure about print lessons.

[Max Lee]

I bought the pdf from https://opendtuning.org/ a while back.

It is well put together and has good diagrams. But to be honest, you could work out all the information yourself by staring with what the CAGED shapes look like in vestapol (if that's how you visualize the fretboard).

If you're looking for other vestapol players who don't always use slides, check out joey landreth and mp gannon if you haven't already! Ariel posen gets an honorable mention, but he also plays an equal amount of standard.

[Dave Mudgett]

Here's a freebie intro to Open D - https://tonypolecastro.com/play-open-d-3-easy-steps/

I have played Vestapol tuning, either with slide or fretted, since I first saw Johnny Winter in 1969 or 1970 in Boston. That single event put the bug in me. Vestapol (lo-hi) 1-5-1-3-5-1 and its cousin 5-1-5-1-3-5 (think Robert Johnson and others) are very closely related and used by a lot of players for both slide and fingerstyle. The open-strings key can be moved up or down, but the logic is the same. It is generally agreed that David Lindley did "Running on Empty" on his short-scale Rick tuned Open A Vestapol.

I have an open tunings book somewhere that I got at, I think, a guitar show - I'll try to dig it out, it's buried away somewhere. But note that the middle core of the tuning is 5-1-3-5, with a 1 in either the bass or treble end, or both. Note that this is exactly the same core as standard Scruggs-style 5-string banjo tuning, which is high-1, 5-1-3-5. So the chord shapes match up with 5-string banjo chord shapes, and there are lots of books and online tutorials on Scruggs-style 5-string banjo chords.

For years, I generally approached Vestapol and Robert Johnson style tunings either with a slide only, or with fingers only. And they work fine that way. But as a pinky slider, I eventually found that mixing (i.e., combined fretting and slide) opened things up a lot for me by allowing not only fretting and sliding but also fretting behind the slide. Most if not all chords obtainable via fretting can be obtained by combined fretting, slide, and fretting behind the slide. I highly recommend exploring that as you explore fretted open tunings.

[Richard Alderson]

Thanks for the tips and comments. Good stuff !

[Richard Alderson]

Shout out to Michael Lee Allen ! He sent me some nice copies of additional bottleneck slide material from his vast collection ! Thank you Mike ! They were waiting in the mail for me last week. Much appreciated !!

[Frank Nims]

There's been plenty of blues guitarists who played non slide music in open D (and open G). Acoustic, but easy to adapt to electric.

Check out Stefan Grossman's Guitar Workshop material:

https://www.guitarvideos.com/