I am going back playing in DADGAD after a while. I am not a massive fan of alternate tuning, but I still push myself to do some song-writing in this tuning now and then.

I thing DADGAD is an insanely beautiful tuning for guitar. You can still use some of the chord shapes you already know to familiarize yourself with the tuning. Then, move one finger up or down to discover new possibilities.

I don’t know if I am approaching this tuning in the right way. I don’t have any guitar player I listen to that uses this open tuning, so I can only play things I have in my head. I found myself thinking that I don’t sound different than when I play in standard tuning.

I am sure there are a lot of cool things you can do in DADGAD, so I want to teach you how to play a few musical ideas I wrote yesterday so that you can get inspired and eventually play something in DADGAD.

Tune your guitar a couple of times. The strings always want to go back to the standard tuning, so keep the tuner next to you.

When I play in a different tuning, I never think about the chords I am playing. I only refer to the root note, of course, but I don’t bother too much about the chord types I am playing.

In the alternate tuning, pretty much all the chords you’ll end up playing have some sort of extended note. Just play around with different ideas before you sit down and analyze everything. Have fun before getting serious about the chords you are playing.

I hope you enjoy this lesson.