Spelling tunings

[Lee Cecil]

HR 5000 might pass the House, but it's sure to be filibustered in the Senate. Send it to committee, and let Brad Bechtel chair it; he's already found the compromise.

[Doug Beaumier]

Low to high seems natural to me. When I see high to low, I'm always doing a mental conversion.

Me too. When I see high-to-low written across a page... I read it backwards! ...from right to left, in order to understand the intervals of the tuning, how the tuning is set up i.e. root, 3rd, 5th, 6th, etc.
Writing an open tuning from thin string to thick string makes No Musical sense, but that's how it has evolved over the years... strings 1 through 6, and the string companies list their string sets that way on the packages, so we're stuck with it.

I've always listed tunings as shown below to avoid confusion.

1. E
2. C
3. A
4. G
5. E
6. C

[Alan Brookes]

If you think about it, they have to refer to the highest strings as first, as there's an upward limit to how high you can go, but no lower limit.

For instance, if you had a 6-string lap steel, and you numbered 1 to 6 from the lowest string, and then you had an identical guitar with 8 strings, the highest string would then be the 8th rather than the 6th.

[Geoff Cline]

I propose an amendment to HR 5000, deleting the words "high to low" and replacing them with "low to high, as is the case most all other musical instruments known to mankind."

[Mike Neer]

Three views of a fretboard:

I



The logical spelling would be:
E
C
A
G
E
C


II



The logical spelling would be: CEGACE


III





Oh come on, nobody views a fretboard this way!

Steinar, is it a coincidence that you have Chinese (or is it Japanese?)writing on your curtains? Chinese script is read vertically (shupai).

You can take the guitar away from the guitar player, but you can't take the guitarist out of him. You all are showing your true colors! Remember, I'm one, too, but I've seen the light.

[Steinar Gregertsen]

Steinar, is it a coincidence that you have Chinese (or is it Japanese?)writing on your curtains? Chinese script is read vertically (shupai).

Only wish I knew what it says, the local Chinese restaurant refuse to deliver food to me!

Remember, I'm one, too, but I've seen the light.

Oh no, not another one......

[Mike Ihde]

The first string may not be the highest in pitch but it's always the furthest away from the bottom string, which may not be the lowest. Didn't the original pedal steel E9th have the E flat and F sharp as strings 10 and 9 before Buddy changed them to 2 and 1?

Another pet peeve of mine is, why does everyone call string 2 an E flat? The open tuning is the key of E which has 4 sharps (or the key of A depending on wether you call the D on string 9 the flat 7 and the E flat on string 2 a "chromatic" note) or 3 sharps in the key of A and E flat is NOT part of that. The 2nd string should be called D sharp!

BTW, Jerry Byrd always wrote his tunings left to right from high to low and never mentioned that they were high to low which has caused some students in my steel guitar lab to break a few strings along the way.

[Alan Brookes]

The first string may not be the highest in pitch but it's always the furthest away from the bottom string...

Except on an ukulele, where the highest string is on the bottom and adjacent to the lowest string.

(I'm not going to mention that instrument with the high drone string...the 5 string banjo. Imagine I haven't written this.)

[Mitch Crane]

I'm for LOW to HIGH as in DADGAD

[basilh]

Another pet peeve of mine is, why does everyone call string 2 an E flat? The open tuning is the key of E which has 4 sharps (or the key of A depending on whether you call the D on string 9 the flat 7 and the E flat on string 2 a "chromatic" note) or 3 sharps in the key of A and E flat is NOT part of that. The 2nd string should be called D sharp!

Quite true Mike, and likewise with the (usual) vertical knee lever change, it SHOULD be called B to A#..

BTW, Jerry Byrd always wrote his tunings left to right from high to low and never mentioned that they were high to low which has caused some students in my steel guitar lab to break a few strings along the way.

Personally I wouldn't take on a student who hadn't got the acumen to figure out the order.
Surely the IQ required to understand, remember, and execute playing the steel guitar, would exclude such a basic misinterpretation ?

I mean how difficult is it to calculate which one of only two possibilities is correct ?

The fact is that Jerry Byrd was correct to do it that way !!(Methinks)That was the protocol then.

I also think that to equate the nomenclature used for ordinary regular guitar and acoustic six string lap steel is a "Red Herring".. Since the thirties the electric lap steel has used the High to low convention. After all it IS a different instrument in many ways to the "Plectrum Guitar" (Old UK BMG terminology still in use over here)

What's next ? maybe we should rethink the way tablature is displayed, after all, if notation is combined in the tab, it's NORMALLY in the wrong octave. How about changing the combined form of tab (Treble Clef pentagram) and using the "Grand Stave" and also demand the normal notational annotations like Crescendo, diminuendo et al ?
Or we COULD adopt functional solmization as per J. S. Curwen/Sarah Ann Glover ?

Or, silliness aside, is the tab convention established ? I think we all understand it because it was developed/fine tuned in "OUR ERA"..

Well, with some of us the era where the convention used for describing tunings was High to Low is still instilled in our memory. As is "Hawaiian Guitar" rather than "Lap Steel"
Unfortunately, today the terminology "Hawaiian Guitar" is slowly being altered to mean "Slack Key" I can understand why, but I don't accept it, maybe "Hapa Haole Music" could be renamed "Hollywood Hawaiian"

My vote is still Yeah for Mike Neer's original suggestion, and by proxy I'll vote for a few dozen more of my octogenarian Player/Friends, and my 3 students (Yes that's all I mentor and instruct)

[Andy Volk]

When I created my Slide Rules book I thought about this issue and researched it a bit and since there was indeed no standardization, I went with high to low because that was the way I thought about it but I also wanted to create a paradigm for illustrating the tunings in a way that was clear and unambiguous as to exactly which string was at which pitch. Rather than use 1,2,3, etc. I decided to use this graphic format ...

[/i]

[wt golden]

I have to vote no on the motion for all of the above mentioned reasons

What if instead - we changed the name of "string 1" to "string 6"

[Kekoa Blanchet]

Here are some more old images, these from a 1935 book called "Kealoha's Modern Harmony Method for Hawaiian Steel Guitar".

The first image shows the notes of the tuning on a staff, and the second image lists the names of the notes (for a different tuning), but both use the low-to-high order. (Or, since in the first image the 6th string isn't the lowest note, I should say that they list the 6th string first.)

[Ulrich Sinn]

Actually when I started learning the guitar (german is my native language) it was tuned like this:

E – A – d – g – h – e’

note that the letters also indicate the octave that the pitch is in.

U.

[John Groover McDuffie]

I'm still with the Hon. Mr. Neer and the esteemed basilh on this one.

[Ian]

A standard tuning would alleviate all the confusion

Ian

[Twayn Williams]

C-E-G-A-C-E

E
C
A
G
E
C


This is the convention in the guitar world. See DADGAD.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guitar_tunings

[Mike Neer]

E C A G E C

or

E
C
A
G
E
C

I'm sticking with it. The Bill may have stalled in the House, but we will lobby the Guitarocrats hard for the next session.

[Doug Beaumier]

The consensus is... We have no consensus! . It looks like HR 5000 is dead in the water.

[Frank James Pracher]

I would like to attach a rider to the bill that states it is ok to use a Stevens bar and fingerpicks are optional.........and I want free lessons for my district. Also I want to outlaw three string slants and bending behind the bar because I stink at it.

[David Matzenik]

I positively, absolutely, and emphatically . . . don't mind either method. It takes me about half a second to figure out which is which.

[William Lake]

.rehtie ti od uoy yaw hcihw erac t'nod I.

[Kekoa Blanchet]

.rehtie ti od uoy yaw hcihw erac t'nod I.

Best answer so far!

[Doug Beaumier]

I have a solution... start anywhere and go around either way. It's called the Circle of C6.

[tab]
C

E E

C G

A
[/tab]

[Kekoa Blanchet]

No Doug, the Circle of C6 should look like this: