By Ronny North

It's always fun to experiment with new Tunings to see what you come up with. There's a few that are easy to do and that can open up some new avenues for you to come up with some cool new ideas on both electric and acoustic.

The first is an easy one. Just drop your low E String down a whole step down to D. You'd be surprised how much heavier this will make your Guitar sound. This also allows you to just bar your finger across the E and A strings to create a power chord.This is a trick used by so many popular bands including Kings X, Van Halen (Unchained), Sound Garden, and countless others.

Another cool trick is to tune the whole guitar down a 1/2 step. It will make the guitar ring differently and it will make the strings a little looser and even make it a little easier for your singer to hit those high notes. This is a very popular tuning and also has been used forever by many popular bands like Van Halen, Guns and Roses, and KISS, to name a few.

The last but not least is just tune the whole guitar down a whole step to D. One full step down from standard A440 tuning. This makes your guitar sound much heavier and is a tuning I use the most for my music.

Definitely try these if you get a chance. Obviously there countless other tunings, but these are 3 easy ones for someone to experiment with. With the Drop D tuning, if you have a non tremolo guitar, it is pretty easy, and you shouldn't have to adjust anything. For the other two, you might need to tweak your truss rod a little to make up for the different string tension. If you have a guitar with a tremolo, you will have to adjust the spring tension as well, which is a definite pain but easy enough to do.

On that note, there's a few products on the market that you can install on your guitar to drop your low E down a step or two. For non tremolo guitars, there's the Hipshot unit that installs on your low E tuning peg and with a flip of a tab on the peg, you can set the unit to drop the low E string down a step or two. On Floyd Rose tremolo equipped guitars, there's a few units available that will do the same thing but from the bridge end that attach to the low E bridge saddle. On guitars with tremolos, you will also have to make it so the bridge is no longer floating (meaning the bridge only goes down and you can't pull up on it). Since the device will be lowering the pitch of the low E string, it will change the tension on the bridge so you have to have it blocked to just go down. There are also many devices to put in the spring cavity to stabilize the tremolo such as the Trem Stop. It's all very easy, and you can easily do it yourself without any major modifications to your guitar.

While experimenting with alternate tunings, you will also notice that the string tension will change when you change tunings. For Drop D, you should be cool with your regular string gauge, but for those of you who are really sensitive to the tension on your strings, you might want to maybe go up a gauge on your strings to make it feel more consistent to what you’re use to.

Now go experiment and have fun...

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