DADGAD,
D modal tuning or
Celtic tuning is an alternate
guitar tuning most associated with Celtic music, though it has also found use in rock and other genres. Instead of the
standard EADGBE tuning, the six guitar strings are tuned, from low to high, DADGAD. Tuning to DADGAD from standard is accomplished by tuning the first, second and sixth strings down a whole tone (two steps). The result is an open D suspended fourth chord (see
suspended chord). Being suspended, the open tuning is neither intrinsically
major nor
minor. Tunings such as DADGAD are often referred to as
modal tunings.
DADGAD was popularised by British folk guitarist Davey Graham. Graham employed the tuning to great effect in his treatments of celtic music, but also the folk music of India and Morocco. The first guitarists in Irish traditional music to use the tuning were Mícheál Ó Domhnaill and Dáithí Sproule; today it is a very common tuning in the genre. Other proponents of the tuning include Russian Circles, Luka Bloom, Stan Rogers, Jimmy Page, Artie Traum, Pierre Bensusan, Eric Roche, Laurence Juber, Tony McManus, Bert Jansch, Richard Thompson, Dick Gaughan, Soig Siberil, Gilles Le Bigot, Imaad Wasif, Jeff Tweedy, Paul McSherry, Kotaro Oshio, Ben Chasny and Trey Anastasio. English folk musician Martin Carthy now mostly uses a related tuning, CGCDGA, whose explicit evolution from DADGAD he describes in his book.
The suitability of DADGAD to Celtic music stems from the fact that it facilitates the use of a number of moveable chords which retain open strings. These act as a drone on either the bass or treble strings, approximating the voicings used in traditional Scottish and Irish pipe music.
The DADGAD tuning was used extensively by Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin and The Yardbirds in the late '60s and '70s. While with The Yardbirds, Page recorded an instrumental entitled White Summer, itself inspired by the first recorded DADGAD tune, Davey Graham's arrangement of the traditional Irish tune 'She Moved Through the Fair'. On Led Zeppelin's eponymous first album, Led Zeppelin, he used this guitar tuning to perform "Black Mountain Side", though he detuned the entire guitar by one-half a step for the recording, so it was really D-A-D-G-A-D (where the '' denotes a flattened note)--the piece which was strongly influenced by Bert Jansch's earlier arrangement of a traditional Irish song called "Blackwater Side" (though Jansch actually used a simpler 'drop D' tuning). Page later revisited the DADGAD tuning for the song "Kashmir", which appeared on the band's sixth album Physical Graffiti.
In addition, Trey Anastasio has employed DADGAD tuning for the song "The Inlaw Josie Wales" from the Phish album Farmhouse.
See also
List of guitar tunings
References
External links
Guitar Tunings - How To Tune To DADGAD
Guitar Tunings - Guitar School Online
A list of recordings with DADGAD Tuning
Category:Guitar tunings
