Fourth of July and Drop C

As I write this, I have just set my guitar down after playing it for an hour or two.

My 2000 Ibby Gio, which I re-tuned and re-set up for Drop-C and Open-F tuning.

As I have noted previously in this blog, I play guitar and sometimes write and record my own music. I haven't written or recorded anything in over a year or two -- just haven't found the time to do it, or had the inclination. But I still play -- mostly rhythm and slide, bluesy hard rock guitar parts. I do it for relaxation, and to keep my ability.

Lately I've been relearning guitar, by exploring the tunings of Drop-C and Drop-D. For those of my readers not into guitars or rock music, this post may get a little tedious. You've been warned. :-)

A pic of my older Ibby (not my GRX40 Gio -- it's an 882 model with Matao pickguard and pickups), and my 2000 Marshall Valvestate amp, a very versatile amplifier that sounds decent through its own speaker and even bigger through a speaker box. The stomp boxes on top of the amp are two of my standbys -- a Boss DD3 delay and Boss CE5 chorus, which I always have plugged into my signal chain. The yellow thing is an old Ibanez Flanger which I was using a lot when I originally wrote this article in 2018, to attempt to duplicate the sounds Andy Summers got in the Police.

REDISCOVERING MUSIC FROM THE NU-METAL ERA

A couple weeks ago I was going through my CD collection and found a slug of discs that brought back memories of the turn of the Century -- mainly the nu-metal years 2000-2001.

It is an era I remember fondly. It was that time period after Y2K and before 9-11 hit. It was actually a heady time for rock music. Sort of it's last big gasp.

After a period in the mid-to-late 1990's where life seemed to be dragging, things were looking up. I remember that the music around 1999-2000 seemed to be on the verge of a new wave of heavy hitting rock -- what is now termed 'nu-metal'. There was a vibrancy and punch to the sound -- including the use of industrial sounds (admittedly used on earlier records by bands like Nine Inch Nails) and detuned guitars -- the guitars usually tuned as low as B or A, and with a lot of heavy power chords mixed with octaves. The nu-metal sound really peaked around Summer 2001.

I think what turned me on to the nu-metal sound was hearing Saliva's hit "Your Disease". It seemed that the music was so upbeat in feel compared to much of what was popular during the 1990's. A lot of the other bands of that era -- POD, Linkin Park, Skrape, The Cult's Beyond Good And Evil CD, Buckcherry, Apartment 26, Sunna, Filter, Fear Factory, Eighteen Visions, Korn, Slipknot, Creed, Rage, Static X, Linkin Park, and the like -- generally tuned their guitars down to D, C, B, and even lower to achieve a boomy growl that when multilayered had a very cool feel to it.

All through the 1990's and 2000's I played my electric guitars almost exclusively in Open G (DGDGBD). Before that I always played in E or E-flat standard, but after a spate of tendonitis in my left ring finger in early 1990 I switched to Open G to keep the tendonitis at bay (Open G lends itself to treat your ring finger more kindly). After re-learning how to play chords, slide, and lead in Open G I stuck with that tuning for years. On acoustic guitar, I messed around with different tunings (DADGAD, EADGAD, EADGBD, etc.), but on electric my guitars were set up for Open G exclusively and stayed that way. The tendonitis went away, but the G tuning stayed. :-)

That was until a month or so ago. I dug out my old 2000-2001 CDs in a stint of nostalgia, and realized that the guitars on those CDs were not only tuned down a couple steps, but they often weren't tuned to standard tunings (D standard, C standard, etc.).

A lot of these guys used "dropped" tunings, where you tune the guitar to a standard tuning (E standard, D standard, etc.) and then you drop the low E string another whole step to DADGBE, CGCFAD, etc.

The 7-string guys (Korn, for example) usually tuned to Low A-Standard (ADGCFAD), but the 6-string guys, like the guitarist in Linkin Park, for example, tuned to Drop-C or Drop-D  -- and sometimes even lower. Slipknot reportedly tunes their 6-strings to Drop-A and Drop-B.

DROP-D AND DROP-C

The Drop-D tuning (DADGBE) has been around a while -- Neil Young used it on the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song "Ohio" in 1970. There's also a YouTube of Canned Heat playing in Europe somewhere in 1969 or '70, and one of the guitarists drops his E-string to D to get Drop-D.

But the grunge bands Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice In Chains made Drop-D popular again in the early 1990's, and the sound struck a chord with many bands after that: Rage Against The Machine used Drop-D extensively, for example.

Before this summer, I had naturally heard of Drop-D but never really got into it. It just didn't seem all that useful. Any time I tried it, it just seemed pointless.

After listening to my nu-metal CDs I decided to give drop tunings another try.

As I've mentioned on here before, I have an Ibby Gio GRX40 which is a 2000 model, which was given me by a friend of my mother in 2003. For the past few years I've had it tuned to D-standard for a couple reasons. First, it was tuned that way when I got the guitar, primarily because the strings were thick (.52-.12 gauge). Second, it was my only standard tuned electric guitar, so I decided to keep it that way so I'd have a standard-tuned electric to play.

For a long time I merely did the usual Strat things with it, Robin Trower and similar bluesy, jazzy styles of playing.

I decided a week ago to detune it to Drop-C. This meant I would drop the low E string from D to C. Simple. DGCFAD to CGCFAD.

To do this and have it sound OK I had to re-set the low 'E' string's saddle, to increase the string tension slightly, and re-compensate the intonation after raising the string a bit. To intonate it right I had to file the saddle a bit shorter than it was -- the 2000 Gio was apparently designed for E-standard and lighter strings, and Drop-C is a bit lower than I think it was designed to handle correctly.

After a few weeks of fine tuning, I had to readjust the Low-E string's saddle to where I actually removed the spring. Problem finally solved. :-)

A pic of the humbucking pickup and bridge of my Ibanez GRX-40 Gio. The pickup is a Powersound -- stock humbucker, which I've left on. It sounds best adjusted away from the strings about 4-5 mm. The bridge is adjusted for a mix of playability and string tension... to get the lowest string to intonate right I had to file the saddle short, and then remove the spring, as can be seen. The heads of the adjusting screws were rounded off with a needle file to keep them from digging into my hand when playing. If one does that sort of 'modification', one must be careful, because the hex indents (for a hex adjustment tool) aren't very deep. The string gauges here are 52-11 or 12.

I had already shortened the saddle a bit to get the guitar to tune right in D standard. Dropping the .52 gauge string to C presented a bit more of a problem, especially as I have ten-ton wrists -- years of playing hard rock rhythm (I sound like a fast Malcolm Young or slow Mick Cocks for the most part), even with the Fender thin celluloid and Dunlap Delrin thin picks I use, it is so easy to make a low E string 'wow'.  A string which is at reasonably low tension is going to 'wow' that much easier.

I had this problem in the early 80's when the E string would wow all the time. I took my guitar to Mike Lull, a local luthier, thinking there was something wrong with it. He looked it over, and finally told me to play a few chords. Then he told me "it's not the guitar -- you're hitting it too hard."

Part of the problem is that slamming the strings the way I do gives me a certain sound, a certain quality of break-up through the amps that I like, and it sounds like me. But with these new tunings, I have to learn to adjust. Over the years I've learned to lighten my touch just enough, and use heavier gauges (.50-.12 usually, depending on the guitar).

With the Ibby tuned to C it only made me have to learn to play even lighter. Let the pick do more of the work than the wrist. Live and learn.

After a week or two of playing in Drop-C, it's a different world. It's like relearning guitar almost completely. My fingers want to revert to either standard-tuning or Open G chord configurations. At times it is a bit frustrating, but eventually the fingers re-learn their positions.

It's kind of cool to get that low growl out of my guitar when I hit a Dropped C chord. I can play along with my Skrape CD and learn the chords (Skrape was one of the second tier of 2001-era nu-metal bands -- it's well worth checking out their Tokyo live video on YouTube:

Skrape live in Tokyo Japan - August 19, 2001 - YouTube).

Lately I've been getting back into Fear Factory, a band I got into in 2001 when their Digimortal CD came out. I love that mix of nu-metal and industrial sound they get. Their guitarist, Dino Cazares, started out detuning his Ibby 6-strings to B or A, and then went onto Ibby 7-strings. He now plays his Ibby 7-string tuned to low B or low A. He only uses a .54 on the lowest string, which presently is usually tuned to B. How he can play it that low without making the string wow I have no idea.

Here is a cool YouTube clip of Fear Factory playing their song "Replica" live at Ozzfest, probably Devore (N. of San Bernardino), California, 1996:

Fear Factory - Replica (Live At Ozzfest '96) - YouTube

DROP-D EXPERIMENT ON MY LOTUS L520 GUITAR

Playing in this new Drop-C tuning has been the highlight here for the past few weeks.

I have also took the liberty of retuning my Lotus L520 (a terrific sounding Les Paul copy) from Open G to Drop D, taking a cue from Pearl Jam, who used Drop D a lot, especially early on. It took a bit of getting used to going from DGDGBD to DADGBE. The fingers have difficulty quickly switching from a tuning I've used since 1990 to a tuning I'm just learning now. So far, with that guitar, it's been little more than an experiment.

My Lotus L520 was an impulse buy in 1996 or so. It was a heavy guitar, and sounded good. It has an ash body, and it's heavier than a Gibson. The wood and (probably Korean) humbucker pickups give it a nice heavy snarl. It's what I call a 'short-tail' L520, as the distance between the bridge and tailpiece is shorter than any of the other L520's I've seen online. Whether this is due to a glitch at the manufacturer, or was a design change near the end of its run, I don't know. Information on these Indian made wonders is few and far between on the internet.

I started out tuning my L520 to E-standard but switched to Open-G after about six months. I recorded it on one song in Standard (a song called "Here Alone", it's the guitar on the right channel). Then I switched it to Open G.

Now I have it in either Drop-D, or Open G, depending on how I want it to sound.

GUITARS DON'T LIKE CHANGE -- 'CHANGE BAD'

One thing I found right after retuning the Lotus was that the guitar didn't hold tune as well. When you have a guitar set up for a certain tuning, and it's set up right, it tends to stay that way: tuned. If you retune more than one string permanently, it will often act up for a little while. The neck shifts a hair, the saddles on those strings may not intonate 100%, and the pickups or pole pieces may or may not need readjusting. The strings themselves probably also readjust to the new tension. And then, your fingers have to adjust as well.

For a few months, I dropped my Lotus to Open-F#, a step lower than Open G -- I was aiming for a heavier, Nu-Metal sound. It worked well after the guitar settled into the tuning. But that tuning wasn't quite so useful, as I'm not much of a Nu-Metal player. I'm more of a blues rock player. So back to Open G / Drop D the guitar went. And when I switched the guitar back up to the higher tuning, it took a while for the guitar to settle back in and stabilise at the higher tuning. This happens.

One thing I've found over the years is that every component of a guitar works together: bridge, string gauge, string tension, nut, height of the strings -- change one component, often you have to adjust one of the others. This also goes with the pickups -- if they're too high and you have thick strings, the strings may act wonky.

"STRAT-ITIS"

With single coils this can be a famous issue ("Strat-itis"). With humbuckers, because of the 'balanced' magnetic field, it's not so much an issue. However, "Strat-itis" can still happen if your magnet is ceramic, and you're using thick strings, as I found to my surprise with my Ibby Gio. One day recently I raised the humbucker a little to beef up the sound of the lower strings, and all of a sudden I was getting weird resonances at the 9th fret when playing a bar-chord. It took a few minutes for me to determine that it was the magnet screwing with the lowest two strings. When I lowered the pickup back down about half a millimeter or so, the problem went away.

Live and learn.

Either way, even when retuning your guitar to another tuning sometimes you have to re-balance the pickups by adjusting the pole pieces, because the strings either get louder or softer due to the change in tension. I have the last two pole pieces removed from my Lotus' bridge pickup to make all the chords sound good in Open G. Fortunately, it still sounds good in Drop-D.

Drop-D in my trusty Lotus actually works well. It just took some time to readjust a few things.

Power chords in Drop-D sound different than they do in Standard or Open-G. They really roar. Technically, there should be no difference -- a string is a string. But it might have something to do with the lower three strings all being the same length when you hit a power chord. They really ring out and project.

The Drop-C experiment has opened up a new world for me on guitar, anyway. I've already come up with a few chord sequences that sound cool in the tuning. I never messed with nu-metal sounds previously, so it's kind of a change to adapt and see what elements of it I can work with and still make them mine. Once I got the Gio set up reasonably well in Drop-C, it really sounds good in the tuning. I suppose it is appropriate, as the guitar was built in some anonymous Chinese factory in January, 2000 -- when nu-metal ruled the rock airwaves and nu-metal bands could fill arenas and even stadiums.

OPEN F -- a C and F drop tuning for SLIDE

After maybe a year of having my Ibby Gio tuned to Drop-C,. I got back into slide guitar (in late 2019), and decided to try the Gio in Open-F, which is a slide tuning -- basically Open-G dropped down a whole step (from DGDGBD to CFCFAC). The guitar still responds much the same. The Drop-C tuning makes it a little easier to hit the crunch chords and rattle them off more quickly -- the Open-F makes it easier to do heavy chord playing as well as slide, and the lower tuning sounds naturally deeper than Open G, which is the tuning I use on all my other electrics.

I'd suggest any slide or rhythm player who uses Open-G to drop it down a step to CFCFAC and see how it sounds. 

FOURTH OF JULY = FLOP OF JULY (2018)

In other happenings, we had our summer here, and the weather overall was decent. The summer, of course, included a holiday: the Fourth Of July.

The Fourth Of July was a flop, basically. Nobody was blowing off any rockets or anything, even on the nearby hills where the skies used to light up quite a bit. Around midnight someone nearby decided to pull out their fireworks and blow off a few rockets, and I managed to get a few photos before they quit about half an hour later.

Lately we've had a spate of decent weather -- but it's been hazy, as smoke from forest fires in British Columbia has drifted south over Washington state. When I went to work earlier today I had little bits of ash on my car.

Since then, the haze has continued. Sometimes you can sense it while you breathe -- other times, not so much. It seems to have affected the weather, cooling it down a bit, basically slamming the hammer down on the end of summer. Blame Canada. :-)

The past several days (August 25 and afterwards) the smoke has cleared. Now it feels like Fall outside. Summer is on the way out. Another season passes.

September 11th came and went, and even though it was 17 years ago, it still is a strong memory. I thought about writing a post here, but I've already done that in previous years. Here is a post with my reflections of that day:
https://interrocknation.blogspot.com/2016/09/my-september-11th.html

Soon enough it will be October, and Halloween will beckon. I suppose my next post will be sometimes around then. I hope to decorate for the Halloween holiday early this year. Perhaps I will have some good pics.

Until then, dear readers, Peace.
C.C.
9-19-2018 and 10-7-2018

After over two years with this post sitting unread on my computer, I decided to post it. Hence, the different dates used throughout. I originally intended to include a sound clip of me playing in Drop-C, just for the heck of it. Then I kept putting it off. 

Then I found out that unfortunately, Blogger doesn't have a sound clip posting capability, so I can't post a sound clip of me playing in Drop-C.

Of course, 2018 was a while back, and pre-Covid, and pre- a lot of things. So, I decided to go ahead and just post this article now as is, with a couple additions, and get it out of the way. 

I'm closing this note with a pic of my cat Huggy Bear, who I lost a year ago, in September 2019. He just disappeared. Emails to neighbors resulted in a few sightings over a week or two, but no one who saw him knew that he was a lost cat, so they didn't tell me until well after he was gone completely. Huggy Bear was an independent sort -- he didn't like to respond when called, and loved to hang out at a nearby grassy area that bordered a pond where he hunted mice. It's possible a raccoon or coyote spooked him and he ran into the neighborhood, before disappearing a few days later.

He was a great cat, and a great pal to one of my other cats, who still misses him.

Here is a pic of him, taken a couple weeks before he disappeared.

The last year and a half have been tough, losing three cats.

However, life goes on.

Peace,

CC 12-3-2020


ADDENDUM, 12-8-2020:

I added a small paragraph about "Strat-itis" that is rare, but can still apparently happen with a humbucker equipped guitar, as my GRX40 Gio got it when I raised the humbucker a bit to beef up the low end.