Byrd on his diatonic tuning

Andy Volk · Post by **Andy Volk** » 28 Aug 2016 8:58 am

Found this in cleaning out a drawer today:

Doug Beaumier · Post by **Doug Beaumier** » 28 Aug 2016 9:24 am

Nice letter, Andy! Notice that he writes the tuning from high to low, as most steel players did in the early days of steel guitar. That's how I learned it and I still think high-low.

Jerry said that he tried including a D in the tuning to make it a complete C diatonic, but the D just seemed to get in the way. It probably didn't fit the style he was playing. Also interesting to read that he didn't consider himself to be a single string player.

Andy Volk · Post by **Andy Volk** » 28 Aug 2016 11:25 am

In the same letter, he went on to say that the recordings that Bear Family released as "Jazz from the Hills" that featured JB with Chet Atkins, Homer & Jethro, Dale Potter and others were done just to kill time between sessions at RCA and with no thought off posterity. Jerry said that if he and Chet were to record them today,(1995) they would play them in a much different way.

Doug Beaumier · Post by **Doug Beaumier** » 29 Aug 2016 1:37 pm

If you omit strings 3 and 6 from Jerry's diatonic tuning you have standard C6 tuning (the top 5 strings of C6). So a lot of C6 stuff can be played on the tuning by skipping strings 3 and 6. The B string is the natural 7th which makes a nice major7 chord. The F becomes the root for some interesting chords, F, Fmaj7. I think there are also some partial chord voicings for 9th and 7th chords in the tuning. I haven't played the tuning in a while. When I was experimenting with diatonic tunings a few years ago I liked John Ely's A diatonic more than Jerry's C diatonic. My version of "It Was a Very Good Year" was played on Ely's A diatonic (tuned down to G, as I remember).

b0b · Post by **b0b** » 29 Aug 2016 3:54 pm

Jerry tuned by ear to just intonation. The D string would have been impossible, as it can't be tuned to both G and A at the same time. Perhaps that's why it "got in the way".