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And now, something completely different. What about nonopened tunings that are not so often used by guitar players. I myself use few exotic tunings frequently used in various guitar pieces. Now, we'll give a short explanation on some of the exotic tunings I use.

       
 
  Shifted E Tuning
EG#C#F#BE		 I have not found this tuning anywhere (maybe I'm wrong, please notify me) so, for my purposes, I rearranged guitar strings, in such a way that simple E major chord comes with same finger positions as in normal tuning, but shifted by one fret up (see chord diagram on the bottom of this page ), so I called it shifted E tuning. Here is how to tune up your guitar : strings 5,4 and 3 (A , D , G) are dropped down by a half tone to G#, C# and F# respectively. Other string are the same as in normal tuning.

  All Fourths Tuning
EADGCF		 Now, this is a tuning !! All strings are tuned in intervals of quartas. Cool! The first string is simply tuned by a half tone up, from E to F and second string by a half tone from B to C. This tuning was invented by Tom Noonan and you can find chords and a whole theory on this tuning at his site.

 
  Why those exotic tunings ?

You've got me on this? In my case, the reason is simple. I have a melody in my head, I work it out, I do the harmonisation, fingering, and...... a need for alternate tuning arises by itself. So, the main reason for such tunings is left hand fingering. You just can not play the melody without retuning your guitar. When I found a tuning for that particular song, I try to make more songs in this tuning, and now I have to do a little theoretical work: why this and why that ?

Sometimes you start with some popular alternate tunings: Celtic tuning , low C tuning, open D tuning, open G tuning etc.. and derive a variation on these tunings, again for some melodic, harmonic and left-hand fingering reasons.

Tom Noonan's All Fourths tuning is very interesting case. I don't know how he get on this, but on his site, you can find an introduction to his book on this tuning written in very systematic way.



  Here are some chords used in Shifted E Tuning: