Moore, Thurston
One of New York’s most celebrated alternative bands, Sonic Youth championed alternate tunings for new alternative generation…
Speaking to Guitarist in 2015, Moore said: “When Sonic Youth first started, I didn’t feel like I needed to be at any level of playing to do what we had to do. Lee [Ranaldo] was more accomplished. He had actually been playing guitar in a way where he could work his way around a fretboard fairly well, but I was just instantly like, ‘F*ck it, I’m just going to put a drumstick under the 12th fret! We kind of started f*cking around a little bit with stuff on Confusion Is Sex [1983]. And a lot of that was just based on the guitars we were using, like one just had four tuning pegs on it and four low strings. It wasn’t until after that that this tuning of F# F# F# F# E B happened, and that was the first real tuning that was sort of notated. I immediately started writing songs in it, like Brave Men Run and Death Valley ’69. Then we refined how things worked and worked with other tunings. Lee would either do something that was in unison or he would do something of his own invention that was complementary. It wasn’t discussed. It was just the way we were doing it.”