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niftyprose wrote:Hello guys, slightly nervous about taking this as the subject of my first non-effect post. I feel a bit like the artist in that early Daniel Clowes comic: "An eagle's quill? Can you *believe* how outre I am?" Nevertheless, here I am plugging Leavitt tuning.

Leavitt was a guitar teacher at Berklee before it was Berklee. He played a regular guitar but had a particular fondness for lap steel, and towards the end of his long career started developing a new tuning that would enable lap players to get jazz voicings without recourse to slants, behind-the-bar bends and of course kneelever retuning systems. Leavitt tuning puts a diminished chord in the bass and sticks the top strings on a couple of wholetone intervals, thus:

C# E G Bb C D

It's kind of the opposite of Fripp's New Standard tuning, which is mostly fifths and stretchy. Simple as it looks, you can get a lot of hip inversions out of Leavitt's basic notes, at the expense of overall range (to spell it out, you don't get much below the D string of a standard-tuned guitar). Leavitt's friend and student Mike Ihde, a helpful guy, has a couple of book-and-CD offerings on the tuning, if anyone thinks "Aha"!

I got into Leavitt because of wanting to play jazz on slide guitar. I'm apparently pretty strange for trying it on a 'normal' guitar, but once you start using Freeze pedals and granular effects the limits it places on conventional licks don't count for much. The main problem for me is that I very often want to drop the bass from C# to C because doing so gives me a major chord on the bottom three strings. I'm looking at installing a Hipshot for that.

Incidentally, going back to the top of this thread, where there was some discussion of Orkney tuning, CGDGCD? The guy in those videos is Steve Baughman, who pretty much invented Orkney tuning (if you can invent a tuning). He has a few lessons on YouTube and will still sell you his earlier 'Power of Claw' video, which introduces clawhammer styles on a couple of tunings including Orkney. PoC is an excellent course, and clawhammer is crying out for reapplication outside of folk. Just sayin'.

NP

Chankgeez wrote:What's the best tuning for Indian steel guitar?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H90k9934yUw[/youtube]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H90k9934yUw

Chankgeez wrote:I believe those're the liner notes to that VHS I used to (and may still) have.

Blackened Soul wrote: Also on the steel topic within a topic.. I use the tuning they have in there [dropped down a whole step] a lot and alternate with the 3rd string up a half step for minor sounds. I'm getting close to putting together a bass steel 8 string which would add 2 more lower strings to this tuning

Adoom wrote:DADGAD Variants.

For one project, mainly DADGAD or AADGAD.