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Home -> Hanging on a Star -> contents -> Nick's Tunings-> next page
Nick's Tunings
I mentioned on the previous page that hammer ons and pull
offs are very important, 'particularly in terms of actually
working out the music of Nick Drake': the key to unlocking
much of Nick's music is a knowledge and understanding of the
tunings he used - Not all of Nick's songs are in strange
tunings, but for the most part, Nick found it necessary to
retune his guitar in his own unique way in order to be able
to play what he was hearing in his head. Unfortunately for
us guitarists, at the time Nick didn't find the need to
write down the tunings he used, so therefore one has to use
one's ears, listen closely, and work them out for oneself.
As his tunings were not 'open' tunings, but rather were
tuned to suspensions - in other words at least on string
must be fretted to reach the tonic chord - one has to be
able to listen and recognise the difference in timbre and
resonance between an open string and a fretted string. Now
back to those hammer ons; a hammer on and a pull off have
very distinctive sounds, and as they will almost always be
between an open string and a fretted one with Nick's music
(one could can easily hear that they are), there is your
open string - and typically with Nick's music this will be
the string, or one of the strings, that needs to be fretted
in order to reach the tonic chord.
Take 'Hazey Jane I' for instance; one can safely assume that
the series of hammer ons in the main riff are from open to
fretted strings - one can tell by the sound and from the
speed at which they are played and the ease at which they
flow into the rest of the phrase. So from this you can
determine the tuning of the bottom four strings, and given
that, fathoming out the tuning of the other two strings is
much easier:
As another easy example of hammer ons giving away the tuning listen to the intro of 'Cello Song' - start off with your guitar tuned to the standard EADGBE, put the capo on the sixth fret, and try to work out the tuning. (If you need a clue; there is only one string that needs to be retuned to find it.) When you think you've got it, turn the page over to see if your right.
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