Easy Chords in Open D Tuning – Altered Tuning Guitar Lesson

Here is an easy yet incredibly effective way to create some beautiful sounding chord progressions using Open D Tuning. Open D tuning (also named D vestapol tuning) is one of the first altered tunings (i.e. anything other than standard tuning) that I like to present to my students. Another key tuning is Drop D, which you can find out more about in my lesson (link below):

Drop D Guitar Lesson – http://youtu.be/jjTTWXfPfEA

Open D has us tuning some of the guitar strings lower so that the sound of the open strings is a D major chord (hence the name open D).

A D major chord contains a D, F# and A. On that basis we tune the guitar strings in the following way:

6(E): D
5(A): A
4(D): D
3(G): F#
2(B): A
1(E): D

This tuning is preferable to open E tuning which would require strings 5, 4 and 3 to be tuned higher (at the risk of breaking strings!)

There are a lot of possibilities with this tuning but I wanted to present an approach using only two chord grips. We will be using diatonic chords in the key of D major. Each chord shape references its root note on string 6 which will be fretted with finger 2 and another finger (either 1 or 3) will grab the corresponding 3rd of the given chord on string 3. In the case of a major chord (the I, IV and V chords) there will be a major third in the same fret as the root note. For a minor or diminished chord (the ii, iii, vi and viib5) there is a minor third one fret lower than the root note.

Major Third Interval Lesson – http://youtu.be/t07_TQlDVe0
Minor Third Interval Lesson – http://youtu.be/94jQlbcD2oE

Fretting just two notes gives some beautiful colour to otherwise standard diatonic chords.

Until next time…practise well.

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