If you are intending to play in the bottleneck style a lot, or almost exclusively, it's probably a good idea to use flat-wound strings. In addition, the windings of the lower guage phosphor bronze strings tend to be raised and make quite a scraping sound as the bottleneck is pushed along. New guitar strings tend to have a bright and lively sound, which doesn't translate well into the old blues. In the case of this young man, the state of the strings actually helped produce that authentic old sound. Secondly, a good guitar player will adapt to his instrument and the strings that he has. First of all, you don't need to be a technical genius or be a fantastically complex finger picker to produce some wonderful blues music. This was perhaps the biggest lesson I'd ever had in playing guitar. It was as though I was transported back to the Mississippi Delta. He fitted a glass bottle neck to his ring finger and moved it lightly over the strings to the 12th fret, before bringing it down to the 7th fret, and then the 5th fret, creating the most wonderful, plaintiff blues is sound. He had only played two notes before I realised that this was something special. I laughed behind my hand and made fun of this man, expecting to hear him play very badly. On top of that, the strings were so old that they were green and rusty. While sitting there, a man walk to the stage and prepared to play.Īs he walked past me I noticed that one of his guitar strings had a knot in it between the nut and the Capo. One night in the South of England, I happened to be in the folk Club in a small village, listening to the amateur floor singers and waiting my turn to play.įolk clubs are a fantastic way to learn the trade of playing in front of people. I loved to play complex guitar styles and I tended to ridicule styles that were either too simple or in another musical genre. When I was a younger player, like many people, I was quite arrogant. it wasn't until much later that I heard open G for the first time played properly in the slide or bottleneck style. In those days, I did try to play bottleneck style with open D but it never really worked out.

The slow pieces allow you to get into the music and to get into the chord structure of an open tuning, well the fast pieces are exciting when done well. In particular I'd like to play Blind Blake tunes in open D, because some of them are slow, and some are fast and exciting. I like the idea of open tunings but for a long time they were really a minor part of my repertoire, preferring to play Ragtime blues and Delta blues or fast Piedmont styles. Of course this was finger-picking folk music and didn't involve a slide or a bottleneck. Yes, it sounds great and it gives you the old authentic feel of the Delta blues, but for a long time I just could not stop those strings buzzing.įor many years I played folk music and during that time I was introduced to open D by a friend of mine. I've always had a love-hate relationship with open G blues tuning. The bass EĬomes down to D, the A string down to G and the high E also comes down to D. The actual open G tuning guitar G (2m:58s) is quite easy, and Takes a bit of practice – stick with it, because it’s the backbone of the Strings with one of your fingers behind the bottleneck is very important, and Needs to be higher than when playing normal guitar, so it’s a good idea to keep Rest on the strings while we strum or fingerpick.

Theīottleneck way of playing guitar consists of letting the surface of the slide Open G is the most common example of alternate guitar tunings and using a slide is by far the most common technique for this Delta blues tuning. Gives a different sound and feel to a steel or brass one – it’s a matter of It’s a simpler tuning than open D, and it’s perfectįor playing with a bottleneck or slide. Johnny Joyce model Aria, and at 1:22 I start to explore the open G guitar tuning from The video above opens with an old clip of me playing Crossroads by Robert Johnson on an old

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