Open D Tuning Guitar printable pdf download

Open D Tuning Guitar

Practice Aid: Lesson 2 – How to tune a Guitar (Open D Tuning)

Lesson Overview:

This lesson discusses alternate tunings and explores a few reasons you might

want to make alternate tunings a part of your arsenal of guitar techniques. Then

it demonstrates how to tune a guitar to Open D tuning.

This practice aid will serve as a cheat sheet for how to tune the guitar to an Open

D tuning using the relative pitch harmonic method.

Why introduce alternate tunings so early?

Some of you reading this will undoubtedly wonder why I’m introducing what many

consider an advanced topic as the second lesson in my beginner guitar series.

The answer is simple. Open tunings give us a way to greatly simplify what you

do with your fret-board hand, so you can spend some time learning how to use

your picking and strumming hand. With that in mind, here’s how to tune the

guitar to Open D.

Open D Tuning

Open tunings are very useful to beginners when practicing strumming and

picking patterns because they allow you to simplify what your fret-board hand

has to do. Instead of having to think about where to put every finger, you can

play all strings open, or fret all the strings at the same fret to play any other major

chord. We’ll demonstrate this in our next lesson on strum patterns. So let’s get

your guitar tuned to Open D!

To start, we’ll assume your guitar is tuned to standard (EADGBE) tuning. See

our first lesson on standard tuning for techniques to tune it up if your guitar has

fallen out of tune.

To arrive at Open D, we’ll need to tune 4 strings down either a half step or whole

step (the pitch distance equivalent of 1 or two frets) so you get a D Major chord

when strumming the open notes. The strings will be tuned to D, A, D, F#, A and

D (6

string through 1

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Open D Tuning Guitar