Dropped D tuning study
Summers End

Listen to a mp3 of Summers End with slide guitar playing an improvised melody line.

This is the first half of a tune of mine I call "Summers End". Click here for second half.

First of all, you've got to tune to Dropped D tuning, which simply means tune your bass string down one tone from E to D. The best way to do this is to keep hitting the D string until you hear the octaves blend. If you hear any "beating" in the sound of both strings, you're not quite there. There should be a smooth non-pulsating sound when both strings are struck.

Now your guitar is tuned D A D G B E. Everything is as normal, except your bass string need to be mentally re-adjusted: all notes are two frets higher than they are in standard tuning.

Some players also drop the treble E string to D. That's called "double dropped D".

You'll be able to see the picking hand technique in the movie. This is finger style, not finger picking, which means there's no repetitive pattern there, I'm simply plucking the notes I want to when I want to. The chords are indicated above the tablature, so you can see that basically, it revolves around the I-IV-V of the key of D (in other words D-G-A), And you'll see one vi chord in the there too, the Bm7, and a ii chord, the Em. There are quite a few digressions from the pure chords though, mostly created by the bass line.

Here is the tablature (above are the midi files generated by the tablature program):

As usual, these fragments are often parts of common chord shapes(dropped D shapes in this case), and the best way to approach it is to hold the chords while fitting the melody around them. This allows notes to keep ringing underneath the melody.

Don't forget, if you're still looking for the trick to seeing how the music lays itself out the length of the fretboard, PlaneTalk -- The Truly Totally Different Guitar Instruction Book teaches a very simple way of keeping track of it all, whether chords, melody or harmony. It's a simple visualization technique, using something we all learned the very first day we heard about chords.

Read more about PlaneTalk here.

Happy twangin'

Kirk