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Highly Strung

Article from Making Music, December 1987


How radical can you get with your guitar tuning? Adrian Legg looks at 'Nashville', a rhythm guitarist's trick that borrows from the 12-string tradition. And it doesn't even cost you anything.

Is it reasonably hip to be into country at the moment? I'm never sure about these things, and there are local variations, so it may be necessary to read this in the bog.

For it is true, yes sirree, them ol' shit-kickers got one or two things right, and one accurately smacked nail was acoustic rhythm guitar.

In a biggish country production, what you often want from a rhythm guitar is the 'ching' as the pick hits, some gap filling ability, but not too much bottom end that could clash with a string arrangement, or run across backing vocals and low lead instruments. In a smaller production, more bottom end may be an advantage, but a richer sound altogether will be easier to lay back on. The crucial mistake that used to be made by UK country bands, and for all I know probably still is, was to fill every bloody gap with lead. The result was a pressured and irritating sound; the cure was to send the bastards for coffee and wipe half their stuff while adding a rather special little trick that has applications beyond the yee-hah market.

Nashville tuning, or high strung guitar — the instrument credits vary from sleeve to sleeve according to hat brim size and sensitivity — is a way of using just the highs off a twelve string as a six string. Typically, a twelve set will feature .010 and .014 in pairs for first and second courses, then octave strings, atop the normal third to sixth, of .010 high third, .014 high fourth, .018 high fifth, and .027 high sixth. You drop one each from the first and second courses, and bung this lineup on a six-string acoustic.

A twelve string, depending on the confidence of the maker, may be tuned to normal E, or dropped a minor third. In normal E/6th & 1st tuning, the high G is a minor third over its usual safe tension and is most at risk, snapping more often than the others. The same applies to a six string Nashville tuning, though a shorter scale length guitar, like one of the 24.9in Martins, will snap fewer high thirds than a 25½in scale.

The sound on a solid electric guitar is not very well defined, and the extra harmonic richness of an acoustic is essential in my opinion, but suck it and see. You may well find an unusual sound that suits your own purposes, and I have a very vague memory of an ancient Pretty Things single where the electric guitar sound was interestingly light. Juggling with gauges may be necessary on some acoustic pickups to get an even string to string balance on a Shadow for example, or on the notoriously tricky under saddle pickups. Bass needs to be eq'd right out on any of these. The thumps when the pick strikes, are usually covered in a standard tuning, but are completely exposed here.

For safety and longevity, I usually tune down a tone overall, and put up with getting in a horrendous muddle with capo positions and chord inversions for multi-layer recording. My gauges, on a thin bodied Ovation which doesn't get used for anything else, work out at .009 first (now D) .013 2nd (now A), .009 third (now a high F), .012 fourth (now high C) .020 plain 5th (now G, same as normal third) and .028 wound sixth (now D). The plain 5th may well sound very harsh on some guitars, but gives a good tone in my set-up and will still drop a tone to F for open tunings without causing problems. First and 2nd strings may seem light at these pitches, but work well enough and will bend quite easily on my rather weedy fret bead. An average requirement will lie somewhere between standard twelve string octaves and my own tastes.

In a sparse-ish production, a normal acoustic rhythm can go down, then a high strung on another track with exactly the same right hand. These can then be panned and balanced according to taste, and will give the fullness of a twelve string without the barrel-organ jangle. I've been told of Nashville sessions where the two rhythm players are sat opposite each other with D-18s, one high, one normal, playing together into one microphone.



"If you finger pick a high-strung then things get really interesting"


A prettier technique, but easily done badly, is to use a high-strung only, and put down two or three tracks of different inversions. This sound can be almost undetectable but very good at gap-filling, or it can be pulled forward and featured in a role similar to an autoharp. The economical version is a single shot take down to two tracks via a light stereo chorus, and if you start layering inversions of this, it's quite easy to build up an almost symphonic sound very quickly.

If you want to get up and down the neck much, tuning can often become a fag, especially in higher positions. A normal acoustic bridge is set back further for the thicker strings, where you now have thin strings. If you have no way of compensating or reshaping the saddle (s?), then 12th fret notes and harmonics are going to be measurably out. Most often the high third note will be flat relative to the harmonic, but the plain fifth may well bend a little sharp. It will vary from guitar to guitar, but the implication is that multi-layer recording should be done on an electro-acoustic with a tuner constantly in chain, or with a meter tuning check every take on a miked acoustic.

So far, I've talked about it, and used it, mainly as a recording tool, but it will work on-stage as a rhythm in much the same way as any other bugged acoustic, except that the requirement to reduce bass to get the sound right has an obvious and beneficial effect on the usual bass feed-back problem.

But if you finger-pick a high-strung, then things get really interesting. Bits turn upside down, and right hand rolls get tighter and more rhythmic as different strings repeat the same note. A melody line can be split between thumb and fingers as the notes lie in close bunches across the strings, and scale passages can be set up for the right hand by left hand fingerings that are not far off normal chord shapes.

Often, it pays to think of it in a baroque sense; perhaps thinned out to do a similar job to the harpsichord that chimes gently at the back of a Bach or Vivaldi concerto. Alternatively, if you fingerpick and add in a peak around the 1.8k mark, the guitar can penetrate forward in a very similar way to an oboe.

At the very least, it is a nice little stimulus for the jaded composer. Like the twelve string, it has the happy knack of suggesting new directions from tired old habits by exposing elements that have been forgotten or neglected.

Crucially, once you've found a satisfactory set of gauges and settled on an overall pitch, write down the gauges somewhere safe. Like I said, you can get in a real muddle trying to rethink things when they're an octave up, then a tone down, grab your partner 'n' spin down the middle...


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Hay Maker

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Throat Under Threat


Publisher: Making Music - Track Record Publishing Ltd, Nexus Media Ltd.

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Making Music - Dec 1987

Feature by Adrian Legg

Previous article in this issue:

> Hay Maker

Next article in this issue:

> Throat Under Threat


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