C-G-C-F-G-E

• OVERVIEW •

Used to give life to the legato-tinged cluster voicings of Nick Drake’s Place to Be – the second track from 1972’s Pink Moon, his third and final album. Almost identical to his tuning for the title track: the only difference being that here, 2str is a full 5 semitones lower – decreasing its volume, but opening up useful ‘parallel octaves’ on 5+2str (in the manner of DADGAD and the Open D blues tunings).

 

The song’s character is subtly recoloured by how Drake’s ancient, degraded strings respond to the tuning’s vast tension disparities (e.g. 1str is 50% tighter than 2str) – something accentuated by the pressure of his 2fr capo. On top of this, he’s also tuned deliberately ‘messy’: everything is sharper than concert pitch, and some chords have an odd, dreamlike resonance, nudged just outside equal temperament (try your own ‘nudges’ too: e.g. I like to push 3str slightly sharp & 4str slightly flat, ‘stretching’ the distance between the core tones of Drake’s melody…).

Pattern: 7>5>5>2>9

Harmony: Cmaj11 | 1-5-1-4-5-3

• TUNING TONES •

• SOUNDS •

Place to Be, a gentle-yet-fast folk waltz, is among Drake’s final recorded tracks. He set it to official tape only once (in Oct 1971), and it seems highly unlikely that he ever played it live. Aside from a single studio session, the song may never have escaped the confines of his own bedroom.

 

To me, it’s tempting to want to see the track as representing some extra-inner dimension of Drake’s isolated creative habits: a solo guitar/vocal performance, written while alone, from his sparsest, most stripped-back album (…if you play all his records in order, this track marks the point at which all other instruments have now left the room, never to return: the last sound played by a musician other than Drake is the skeletal piano refrain in Pink Moon, the preceding song).

 

Similarly, the lyrics, which paint faded, distant, simplistic-poetic sketches of loss and alienation, are sung as if the concept of a physical audience was entirely absent from the song’s imagining. Vocal lines enter at odd points in the bar, dislocating meticulously as they fade away.

 

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• Place to Be – Nick Drake (1972):

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“And I was green, greener than the hill,

Where flowers grew and the sun shone still,

Now I’m darker than the deepest sea,

Just hand me down, give me a place to be…”

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But really, I don’t know what was going on in his mind back then (after all, even his close friend John Martyn experienced this profound distance when Drake was alive: as recounted in Solid Air: “Don’t know what’s going ’round inside, and I can tell you that it’s hard to hide…”).

 

This isn’t just about not being able to feel the full depths of another’s depression without having access to their inner experience. While undoubtedly true (and perhaps particularly so for Drake, a man seemingly distant from those in his own life: let alone us, here, today), it can also become a reductive, hazy lens through which to view our creative icons. After all, even if we could somehow feel his own depression ‘from the inside’ – he may not have been feeling depressed that day.

 

As pointed out in a fantastic blog review by Altrockchick, “Depressives have good days and bad days, so without the knowledge of Nick’s mood at the time he wrote a particular song, it’s unwise to automatically assume the influence of mental illness in any of his work – even on Pink Moon, the album most often described as his ‘darkest’…Any artist with Nick’s level of sensitivity is going to experience profound dissatisfaction with the ‘real world’…expressing such dissatisfaction does not always indicate that the artist is in the throes of depression”.

 

Besides, Place to Be summons a more ambiguous set of emotional colours than just the ‘dark, downcast blue’ labels it is often cast with. For one thing, it is unusually fast – rolling along at upwards of 160bpm – and harmonically, the open strings ring with a robust, reassuring resonance rather than offering some dissonant, alienating blend. Plus, it works great when turned up loud! You can hear this energy even more clearly in a strident, arpeggiated home recording (below). I often wonder: what do listeners who speak no English and know nothing of Drake’s life make of the mood?

 

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• Place to Be (home tapes) – Nick Drake (~1972):

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“And I was strong, strong in the sun,

I thought I’d see when day was done,

Now I’m weaker than the palest blue,

Oh, so weak in this need for you…”

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While there’s absolutely nothing I’d change about the song itself (even the awkward between-frets tuning), I do wish that the act of songwriting (or really, anything else) had somehow been able to help Nick out of those isolated depths. Sadly, he never did quite resurface – though just 23 at the time of Pink Moon‘s recording, he would succumb to an amitriptyline overdose (careless yet likely accidental) only two years after its release.

 

(Just a thought: if Nick had lived his twenties in our online age, then maybe – as a photogenic, virtuosic bedroom musician with free time to burn – he’d have found rapid stardom via Instagram? Who knows what he’d make of the web?)

 

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• NUMBERS •

	6str	5str	4str	3str	2str	1str
Note	C	G	C	F	G	E
Alteration	-4	-2	-2	-2	-4	0
Tension (%)	-37	-21	-21	-21	-37	0
Freq. (Hz)	65	98	131	175	196	330
Pattern (>)	7	5	5	2	9	–
Semitones	0	7	12	17	19	28
Intervals	1	5	1	4	5	3

• See my Tunings Megatable for further such nerdery: more numbers, intervallic relations, comparative methods, etc. And to any genuine vibratory scientists reading: please critique my DIY analysis!

• RELATED •

—Associated tunings: proximities of shape, concept, context, etc…

• Pink Moon (this with 2str +5): the album’s preceding track
• Road: …and the record’s next song, closer to Standard
• Low Drop C: four strings the same, but far more familiar

• MORE INFO •

—Further learnings: sources, readings, lessons, other onward links…

• Nick Drake’s guitar: see my Pink Moon, Road, and Carnatic (‘Drake’s Drone’) tuning pages, and his listing in my Altered-tuned Artists article – as well as Chris Healey’s near-comprehensive tab/tunings pages, and Josh Turner’s perceptive video lesson Nick Drake’s Tone: An In-Depth Look
• Nick Drake’s life: to go deeper into his character and creative sentiments, read Altrockchick’s mental health-heavy piece on 50 Third & 3rd, listen to a humanising BBC Radio 2 documentary, and also hear his sister Gabrielle (herself a successful stage and screen actress) reading out an eloquent, heart-wrenching letter written to Nick three decades after his death (“You’re so much with me still, and so much with so many people – I feel I owe you, and perhaps everybody who loves you, an explanation…”)

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Header image: Nick Drake absorbs the forest spirits