In the summer of 1985, my parents drove me to upstate New York, where I spent the next six weeks studying with Bill Dobbins and Gene Bertoncini at Eastman School of Music. While I was still unpacking, the kid from the room next door came in. He was one of just five other kids my age on campus, so despite the fact that he already knew how to drink scotch and played in a band with actual gigs on Cape Cod, we became thick as thieves in a matter of minutes. 

Demographically, we were hemmed in on one side by high school students and on the other by middle-aged jazz fantasy campers. Really, the high school kids were just a couple of years younger than us, and the adults probably no more than five or ten years older, but we established a defensive perimeter around our little collegiate clique and got down to the serious business of digging jazz and grooving on the city of Rochester.

The mid-century student accommodations in that part of the world, while picturesque, don't have A/C, or didn't back then anyway, so we spent a lot of time with the windows open, and despite the screens, got pretty well acquainted with the local insect population. "You're a bug," Tom would say, fixing his gaze on the latest invader to brave the windowsill. "I don't like bugs. That means I don't like you."

I've come to find a lot of people share Tom's distaste not only for unwelcome wingéd wildlife, but for open tunings, too. I get it – if you retune half of your strings or more to play in open D or open G, it mean re-learning where all the chords are. But what about drop D tuning?

Drop D just means taking the low E string down a whole step, or two frets. All the other strings stay the same, so a lot of things don't change at all – for starters, every A, A7, A minor, B7 and C chord you already know.

If you've ever tried to fingerpick a song in D in standard tuning, you know it's the least satisfying key for sort kind of thing. But once you have a great big D as the lowest note on the guitar, D becomes just about the coolest key to play blues in.

With D and A sorted out, all you really need to complete things are a few good G chords. In today's Youtube lesson, I show you three of my favorite G shapes (or voicings, as the jazz cats say) for when you're in drop D tuning:

My Three Favorite Chords For Drop D Tuning

More soon,

David