[guitarjamman]

Please be cognizant of the fact that this is all my own personal opinion, it is not meant to offend anyone – just merely an observation that I have made after some years under my belt of guitar playing.

That being said, I saw Andy McKee play live the other night and was completely blown away by both his accuracy and precision in his fingerings, but more importantly, by his ability to make some of the most melodic fills and flowing compositions. His songs have a certain continuity to them, there are no “hiccups” in his flow and each segmented run flows into the next measure without having to kill a ringing string. To me, the ability to have ringing notes can keep a feel going while changing fingerings to play the next melody – when I am playing and want to move up the neck to play a little run, I have a difficult time keeping the strings ringing, mostly due to planting a new chord shape that immediately kills and resonance. If playing a head bopping tune, I can incorporate those “stops” into a beat so the audience does not catch it, but when trying to play a soothing tune, those stops have the ability to kill the ambience.

When I look at a player like Tommy Emmanuel, I see some serious talent. A lot of his songs are very beat driven and he plays MOSTLY in standard tuning. He has a few songs that go towards open G and drop D, but from interviews I have read and songs I have learnt, he tends to stick with the basic standard tuning. When watching Andy McKee, he was constantly changing tunings after every song, sometimes really switching it up – when watching his fingerings, none of them seemed to apply to anything that would resemble a standard tuning. Now maybe I could answer my own question by learning to play in an alternate tuning, but I feel like there is still WAY too much to learn in standard to go fooling around; but does an alternate tuning help keep the ambience? It seems Andy does not need to pick up his whole hand and move it to keep the melody in tune with the progression, there are no full barres on the neck that would kill and resonant/drone strings. Tommy often barres a whole fret and uses his remaining fingers to keep a melody grooving along, same with Chet Atkins and it appears everyone who plays in a standard. While when watching folks like Antoine Dufour and other “Candy Rat” guitarists who compose in alternate tunings, they are able to minimize their fingerings while maintaining ambient grooves.

I do not have a large enough grasp on the guitar to really understand how tunings can affect composition, but I have some empirical evidence to help me get along. Also, when Andy would go to an alternate tuning to compose a song, is there a lot of theory backing up his composing, or is alternate tuning a lot of trial and error to get a great sound?