Guitar Tunings

Since buying my Tenor guitar, in 2015, I haven’t done much more than play around with it – certainly nothing serious.

This is mainly because I found myself spoilt for choice in terms of tunings. “Standard” tuning is in fifths, CGDA, but they are also commonly tuned to “Irish”, GDAE (also in fifths, or Chicago, DGBE (like the top 4 strings on a 6-string guitar).

Then some people tune then GDAD, and at one point Mike Whitaker had my tenor guitar tuned to ADAD!

Great fun, and all that, but each tuning requires different fingering, and that is what has kept me in an indecisive limbo – I keep coming round to the question “so what AM I going to tune it to?”, and search the web for chord charts in the different tunings, and try to get things straight in my brain.

Anyway last night I came across this online tool, which more or less solves the problem for me. It allows for instruments with different numbers of strings and different tunings, after which it will generate chord charts for you for that specific tuning,

There is no tenor guitar setting, but using the ukulele mode (giving me 4-string chord boxes), and then changing the tuning gives me chord sheets in any format I want. Because you can select specific chords, I can tailor my chord sheet to contain the chords that are actually useful to me, and not be confused by chords I wouldn’t ever play.

So very useful and also great fun.

The software behind it is Open Source and available to download, so I may grab it and install it on my own site, so I can completely tailor it to my own instruments and preferences.