Crosspicking dance tunes
 

A question for those who play fingerstyle arrangements of dance tunes in standard, dropped d and altered tunings which is niggling me.
Do you find that you can play such tunes faster using 'melodic crosspicking' techniques facilitated by altered tunings such as dadgad or cgdgcd than you might otherwise be able to in standard or dropped d ?
Thanks for any comments.

It is a good question. I don't know the answer. I don't play dance tunes on guitar.

I do play dance tunes on trad dulcimer and clawhammer banjo. In both cases, players often move the tuning of the instrument so that a melody will more easily "fall to the fingers".

So I don't see why you couldn't take a similar approach with guitar.

If I was given a guitar and didn't know how to tune it to play it, I doubt that I would come up with EADGBE first off. Nope, it would be some kind of open tuning. And you can actually hear that on some early "mountain/before country" string band recordings where there is a guitar in the band. And on early blues records too.

Up till now the handfull of dance tunes I play have ( with a lot of practice ) worked out ok at dance speed in dropped d but I recently started playing a tune called Gallway Hornpipe sounds nice but melody jumps all over the place so I have to move the left hand ridiculously fast just to play at a moderate speed ,started working on an arrangment in dgdgad to see if it's any easier but It will no doubt take me a long time to find out and work it up to speed as I am no where near as familiar with this tuning.