We take a look at what DADGAD brings to modern metal in this fat-free guide
You’ll have noticed now that many of the tabs on Modern Metal Academy are for songs in DADGAD tuning. An almost-open tuning – because all the open strings played at once don’t quite make a luscious-sounding chord – it was brought to Britain by Davey Graham. Later, Jimmy Page made it world famous with the iconic riff of Kashmir.
A young Acle Kahney (Tesseract) tuned his guitar to DADGAD to learn the song, and never tuned back up to standard. That, ultimately, is what prompted the boss, Browne, to experiment with the tuning, and he’s never looked back either.
“When we go to play in scales, you know when you've hit a wrong note; you can hear it. It's the same thing with this tuning for me,” says Browne. “I build chords on how it sounds, rather than visualising it and it helps me get out of the box.”
For chords too, it opens up new voicing possibilities that you simply couldn't do in standard tuning. You could incorporate tapping, but that's not quite the same.
Thought-free octave jumps
Between the D and A strings, you can start thinking about the octaves where you're in the same positions, just a few strings higher. For metal riff writing, jumping between octaves is a quintessential element, and so this mirrored fret make-up removes some of the on-the-fly maths you'll have to do in standard tuning. To that end, it's like Drop D, but on crack.
From a songwriting perspective, jumping octaves between sections, low for the intro versus high for the verse for instance, can make the a song feel like it's moving in a different direction. This then, can be achieved without any theoretical trickery.
One string wonder
With that in mind, learning your favourite scales across just one string, as opposed to up and down the fretboard is incredibly useful. It can also help break out the typical boxes many guitar players knowingly or unknowingly find themselves trapped in.
Like you would with drop D, once you’ve familiarised yourself with the intervals across one string, you can effortlessly flit between octaves on other strings – there are three D strings and two A strings, don’t forget! Once you’ve wrapped your head around that, there are only two other strings to get comfortable with, so it’s a much more streamlined learning process compared to standard.
Open string harmonics
If you’re playing in a key relative to the open strings of the tuning too, you open up the harmonic richness that open strings can bring to riffs and chords.
So, saying you’re playing an A power chord where you have the root, fifth and root octave fretted all on the fifth fret of the sixth-fourth strings, you still have three open strings which can be experimented with to spice the chord with new flavours.
In this tuning, open strings are your friend.
Fewer fingers, greater possibilities
Another key advantage is that you need fewer fingers to play certain chords than you would when playing in standard tuning. What that means is you have fingers free to hammer on and off extra notes or experiment with extra voicings which can make your chord choices really stand out.
Like with any new tuning or scale, adapting to DADGAD will take some getting used to, but from a modern metal perspective, it offers a lot of pros that we well worth experimenting.
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