Other bands with Alternately Tuned Guitars
 

I love how sonic youth's differently tuned guitars make some awesome unique songs that at times are hard to replicate. So does anyone know any other bands that use their weird kind of tunings ?

BY weird tunings i dont mean drop d or open e, i mean something more radical. Does polvo have Alternately tuned guitars? oxes ?

please name some bands

Ummm...

Pavement, The Tea Party... there's gotta be more, but those are the only ones I could come up with off the top of my head.

Spare the flaming - I don't like him (not that I'd care if I did) - but Dashboard has really good tunings.

JANDEK!!!

nick drake, davy graham, john martyn

My Bloody Valentine

http://www.myspace.com/soneband4 (Shameless Plug)


Click on the song Firm. I wrote that one in an alternate tuning.

i remember reading something about how on some of nick drake's songs his guitar will be tuned so that a lower string (positionally lower that is, higher in pitch in standard tuning though) might be lower in pitch than a string above it. i'm not sure what the reasoning behind this was, but i don't play guitar and i'm not nick drake. there were other things too that he did--anyway, the general point was that he had a truly unique style that required amazing skill and patience.

Nirvana used Drop-D. (joke)

Soundgarden, Polvo, Jeff Buckley from time to time.

The 1991 issue with Thurston named as guitarist of the year in Guitar Player (CHOUT posted the cover scan once) had a side-bar article called "tried & true alternate tunings."

Jandek is a good call, although his guitar sounds more like he's left it in the baking sun for the summer than he's deliberately changed the tuning.

A lot of the Congolese Soukous peeps tune their guitar with a .12 where the D string would usually be, then tuned to F (If memory serves)... it's a kind of banjo type effect.

Seaweed cribbed a load of tunings/ ideas from SY.

Urusei Yatsura had a few guitars all in E's or F's.

Fernando Sor (18th Century classical chappy) had a few odd tunings, bridging the gap between the lyre and the guitar.

We haven't mentioned Glenn Branca yet, have we?

An awful lot of Celtic guitar peices were written in open tunings, much like the blues tunings Atari posted.

Blugrass often changes the D, G or A string to a higher guage to play melodic lines next to the basslines (another banjo emulation).

My Cat is an Alien seem to do lots of weird tunings, but they also do lots of strange things with guitars anyway (more so than SY). See also Keith Rowe (AMM), Henry Cow, Phill Niblock and the more experimental fringes of prog/ psyche.

There's a rich tradition of different tunings in most non-Anglo/ American music, far too many to mention here...

polvo, paik, & kinski

HAHA
found this on a kid's myspace

Richie Havens uses all open tunings.

When the Minutemen started they didn't know that strings had to be a certain pitch. So they just said "I like my strings loose" and they just did their own custom tuning without even taking notes into consideration

Mary Timony, has used the CGDGBE pavement tunings (early helium) and more recently DADGAE on ex-hex

Velvet Underground, I think they used alternate tunnings for alot of songs, but one i know for sure is All Tommorows Parties.

That may be how his guitar sounds, but in the only interview he's ever given, to John Trubee in the '80s, he clearly states that the way he tunes his guitar is completely intentional.

Another artist (arguably "band" as his sound by himself can get bigger than some groups) who does work with a guitar that should appeal to most Sonic Youth fans is Seattle's Bill Horist. He does shit where it looks like he's literally torturing his guitar with all manner of implements, and yet it comes out sounding downright pretty.

Also, I'm guessing that PA's King Kong Ding Dong must use alternate tunings, just on how weird the guitar often sounds. They've got a pretty obvious SY influence going on as well.

john fahey
robert johnson songs are hard to play because his hands were huge...

the Ostrich guitar, all strings tuned at G