A Short Guitar Study of Dropped D Tuning

By: Jim Bruce

To start off this short study of the use of dropped D tuning in acoustic blues guitar picking, I play a short interpretation of Blind Willie McTell’s “Statesboro Blues”.

It’s not too much like the original, except for the tuning, but it does demonstrate how we can adapt picking techniques to our particular style.

Dropping the bass string two steps down from E to D completely changes the flavor of the music and also gives us some flexibility in chord fingering. For example, we don’t have to fert the bass E when playing a D major chord, which frees up fingers for more interesting work around the other strings.

The dropped D note also gives us a low, low note to punctuate the blues sound and counter balance the melody. Done in the right way, it has a powerful effect and has also been used extensively in traditional and modern folk songs by many well known artists.

We can hit the bass string and let it ring, use a monotonic thumb technique (where we just strike one bass with the thumb) or alternate our thumb strokes and damp the basses in a Travis picking style. Whichever style we play, it’s necessary to adapt the chords in some cases. For instance, when playing G7 it sounds discordant if we hit the bass E open, or if fretted on the 3^rd fret like we normally would, so we just don’t hit it at all.

We could also move up the fret board to form a G and fretting the bass E on the 5^th fret – its just a matter of choice and depends upon the style of the song you are playing. (These chord variations are shown in the video at 1m:40s.) We can play any A chord shape we like, but without hitting the bass E note.

At 2m:50s I play an instrumental in dropped D tuning taken from the playing of Stephan Grossman – it’s interesting as the basses walk up and the terbles walk down! A example of  a folk type song created in dropped D is Castles In The Air by Don McClean (3m:16s). At 3m:34s I show how to drop other strings to form open D and then play a low down blues by Blind Blake ‘Down The Country’.

Take it easy and don’t forget to have fun with it.

Cheers, jim