A Celebration of Tunings

Simon explains how tunings open creative doors

“I’m a man that lives and dies by the drop D! If it’s good enough for Helmet it’s good enough for Biffy Clyro! DADGAD is a beautiful tuning. That’s one of the first ones where I started to come up with some more folk-type songs. With some open tunings you just you start to voice your chords in a different way. One of my favourite tunings is CFGDCF. You never find a chord that sounds like anything you’ve ever played before. Every place you put your fingers is new. If you have gone through lessons and you learned a certain way of playing, as soon as you detune the guitar you’re in a brand new, naive landscape and that’s where you discover new things. For me it’s very important. Sometimes I’ll place my fingers on a chord and just detune certain strings and see what happens. There’s a song called Getf*ckedstud [from Puzzle, 2007]. That sounds like weird tuning but all I changed was the G string down to an F#. It makes everything ring differently. On Infinityland, there’s a song called Pause Itandturnitup. I was just going for it. I played this riff, recorded it and didn’t write down the tuning. If anyone out there can find the tuning, that would be wonderful! That was the beauty of it, not having an idea of what the guitar was going to tell me.”