Touché.
Just getting back from a couple of weeks vacation…
It sounds like you are a metal guy? You appear to list 7 strings in the tuning you’re using above - so a 7-string guitar? Dropped D, while super common in metal, is just another tuning when it comes to many other genres - some folkie/bluesy songs use it, but no more than other tunings.
If you already got what you need from the other posters, I’ll let it go for now. But if you are interested in blues and rock stuff, I would steer you towards Open G, A, E and DADGAD - IMHO, those cover most of the rock / blues / slide stuff I happen across…
I forget who it was, but I ran into one composer that programmed an 88 key keyboard to equally divide the half step between C and Db. It was a piece for piano and retuned keyboard.
If you want to hear something really wild, go pick up Chris Potter’s Lift: Live At The Village Vanguard and listen to 7.5. Most of the keyboard solo is being played in “octaves” with itself, but the microtonal tuning results in something very unusual.
Yay! Between this and the new Guitar Hero controllers kids will be able to play beautiful music while still having no idea what they’re doing.
When are they going to make one that automatically tunes the vocal chords?
Sorry, I didn’t type the tuning out properly: (C) (G) (C) (F) (A flat) (C). :smack:
I guess I play with ‘elements’ of metal, but mainly just the riffs. I’m completely HOPELESS at slide, but if I knew I could do some cool non-slide stuff in an open tuning, I would certainly try it. I tried DADGAD recently, and it’s great for bashing out some trippy chords, but I found it hard to do melody/arppegio things in DADGAD.
I take your point, but that Gibson self tuning interests me only because you can have multiple tunings on one guitar without the extra wear and tear on the strings.
ETA: Wow, that selective quoting thing looks easier than it is. 
I was actually thinking, the other day, is it technically possible to create a tune-o-matic? Eg, some pedal, with DSP chips and all that, that converts a guitar tuned to natural, to, say, drop D, or C, or whatever tuning you want, by messing with the signal after it leaves the guitar?
The last article I linked didn’t really say much about the alternate tuning settings, so I found a better one: http://www.wired.com/reviews/product/pr_gibson_tiger
My guess is that it would be too difficult to do with, say, your standard 1/4 inch jack analog input which has all six strings’ audio data together, but if you can somehow get pickup data from each individual string you should be able to do it through basic pitch-shifting. I don’t know for sure, as I don’t know if other strings bleed into each other across the pickup or not.
No, you’d need to go MIDI for that kind of mucking about. One of the old Ztar rigs would probably do it nicely. I’ve been looking into it, and the standard Roland rig has the disadvantage of you hearing the strings at their natural pitch as well as their transposed version. It’d be worth a try for an electric - for any kind of acoustic, I think it would drive you nuts within the first ten minutes because you’d always be hearing both pitches - the one from the axe and the one coming out the computer/amp/rig…
I quite like DADGAD.
Ed Kuepper uses/used a Fender Strat with a (I think) digital pickup added. He could change tunings with the push of a button. It wasn’t MIDI though - the signal was processed digitally.
On another note, most people have mentioned nice tunings for slide or playing chords but I have had a lot of fun messing around with the tuning on my guitar to get interesting sounds - drone strings, dissonance or a mix of the two. I do it when I feel like I am stuck in a rut playing in standard tuning. In that spirit, here is a link to Sonic Youth’s guitar tunings. There are a few dozen of them.
The Line 6 Variax does that plus emulates any guitar or like instrument that you fancy.
Ah, they make modeling guitars now? Logical enough. Anyone tried messing with it? But yeah, that’s a ‘at the strings’ answer.
Yeah, I’ve tried modeling - yuck. The strings are still tuned standard so your amp needs to be loud enough to completely mask the unplugged sound - fine for gigs but what if you practice at bedroom volumes? And the feel of the strings remains the same - but with alt tunings, the feel changes - sometimes a lot - so that is off-putting.
I haven’t tried the Gibson/mechanical re-tune approach. I love the concept and would consider it if the base guitar itself was a great instrument. But there have been a number of threads on various Gibson sites about the ruggedness of the electronic controls - not the mechanical retune mechanism, but the dial you use to switch between tunings. I would want to know if it is gig-ready for a ham-handed slob like me…
Did they pick those tunigs out of a hat or something?! If I owned 50 guitars, I would probably try all those…