Slack tuning

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In guitar playing, an altered or slack tuning is one in which the intervals between the strings are unchanged, but all the strings are lowered in pitch by a given interval.

In most cases, pieces played in slack tunings are actually notated as if they were in standard tuning. This is possible because the guitar in a slack tuning is like a transposing instrument and simply sounds a different note to the one actually written. For example, when a guitar is tuned down one whole step, a piece written in F# minor sounds in E minor (as with "The Thing That Should Not Be" from Metallica's Master Of Puppets).

Contents

1 Origin
2 Drop Tuning
3 Modern development
4 New developments?
5 Effect of Slack Tunings
6 12-string guitar tunings
7 Further reading
8 See also
9 External links

Origin

Although slack tunings are today associated with thrash, death and nu-metal, they had been used for several decades before any of these genres emerged. Blues acoustic guitarists from the South were probably the first to try slack tunings, and certain experimental guitarists in the 1960s also tried down-tuning their guitars. Jimi Hendrix was the first in rock music to do this, always tuning his guitar down a semitone.

Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi tuned his guitar down a minor third on all tracks from Master of Reality onwards, but in fact this was done because of an injury to his fingers which gave him problems playing strings at the full tension of standard tuning. It is a little-known fact that Iommi utilised a treble booster to compensate for the lowering of the higher strings.

Drop Tuning

One form of altered tuning is "Drop D" or "Drop C". These are D-A-D-G-B-E and C-G-C-F-A-D respectively. The purpose of drop tuning is to make it easier to play power chords without having to finger the whole chord, merely fretting strings 6,5, and 4 on the same fret. This allows the power chords to be played faster as well. Bands like Pillar and System Of A Down are some of the more modern users of Drop C

Modern development

A decade later British black metal band Venom adopted the Sabbath practice of tuning down to C# with their first album Welcome to Hell released in 1981. Witchfinder General, another Sabbath-influenced British metal band, tuned their guitars down another semitone to C, with their first album "Death Penalty" released in 1982. By the late 1980s the British death metal band Bolt Thrower was tuning down to Bb. However, it was in the early 1990s with the widespread popular emergence of "grunge" and extreme forms of heavy metal that slack tunings gained great popularity, with countless bands adopting low tunings.

Since that time, slack tunings have been adopted by almost every band in the metal and hardcore genres, so that they are now quite "standard". Josh Homme, former Kyuss guitarist and frontman of Queens of the Stone Age is a notable contemporary user of a slack tuning known as standard C tuning, which is simply standard guitar tuning tuned down two whole steps. Max Cavalera of Sepultura and Soulfly tuned his guitar down a perfect fourth on most of his post-1995 recordings.

New developments?

Apart from the adoption by some bands of baritone guitars tuned down a perfect fifth, no new developments have occurred. Some bands, like KoЯn have adopted 7 string guitars and tuned them slack: low-high; A-D-G-C-F-A-D. Meshuggah have even adopted 8 string guitars to give an even darker tone.

Many death metal bands today are using similarly low tunings with 6-string guitars. God Among Insects play in F, nearly an octave lower than standard!

Effect of Slack Tunings

The basic effect of a slack tuning is to produce a darker and heavier sound, which is typically desired by most heavy metal bands. Acoustically, the tone of slackened strings contains less of the higher harmonics which give standard tuning a comparably harsh edge. Under distortion, this has the effect of emphasizing the presence of the lower (bass) harmonics in the distorted sound.

Slack tunings have the advantage of requiring almost no additional learning by a guitarist experienced in standard tuning: the chords, apart from the necessary transposition, are exactly the same as those in standard tuning. The major disadvantage of slack tunings is the loss of the typical tones of the treble strings due to their lower tuning - not considered important today by most rock groups.

12-string guitar tunings

Although 12-string guitars are tuned in the same way as a standard six-string guitar, very early in their history it was discovered that the number of strings led to extreme stresses on their necks. Consequently, manufacturers always recommended that a 12-string guitar never be tuned above d/D-g/G-c'/c-f'/f-a/a-d/d or a whole step below "standard" tuning. (See Alternate tunings for guitar to understand notation). Whilst in recent years improvements in timbers and truss rods have allowed new 12-strings to be tuned up to pitch with ultra light gauge strings, the same advice regarding tuning is still quite normal among 12-string manufacturers.

Because of the nature of the music for which 12-string guitars are used, there has generally been little desire to slacken the strings any more than is necessary. Often, a capo is used to play in tune with six-string guitars.

External links

[Guitar Tunings - Guitar School Online]

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