Ė-Ȧ-Ḋ-Ġ-B-E

• OVERVIEW •

A part-transposition of Standard, which retains the same notes while raising 6-5-4-3str up a full octave. This halves the range (12 vs. 24 semitones), and also radically shuffles up the order of the tones (low>high: 6, 5, 2, 4, 1, 3str) – essentially like a 12-string with the lower of each pair removed (i.e. ‘Standard + Nashville = 12-string EADGBE’).

 

Thus, the tuning is often used as a ‘high-strung double layer’ in studio settings, in lieu of an actual 12-string – particularly for strummed chordal parts (n.b. You can also mimic this effect by sliding all your shapes up 12 frets: e.g. Gmaj as ‘15-14-0-0-0-15’, Em9 as ‘0-14-14-0-0-14’, etc). Popularised via the 1950s Nashville scene by legendary sessioneer Ray Edenton. Listen out for its characteristically narrow jangle buried in the mid-range of countless old classics…

Pattern: 5>5>5>(4)>5

Harmony: Emin7(11) | 1-4-b7-b3-5-1

• TUNING TONES •

• SOUNDS •

As per Nashville Sound, Ray Edenton “could play many different instruments…but rhythm guitar was his speciality. By his estimate, he played somewhere around 15,000 sessions, although he has no way to get an accurate count”. (Well: his 1953-1991 career spanned 38 years, and 15,000/38 = ~395 sessions a year – or 1.5 for each of the 260 weekdays. Given Nashville’s love of long, multi-session days, his estimate seems plausible…).

 

This lifelong multi-instrumentalism (particularly on re-entrant lutes such as the banjo and ukulele) may have broadened his tuning imagination. In the 1950s, he took to light-gauging his guitar’s G3str (‘high third’) and tuning it up an octave (…in the same decade, Zacharie ‘Jhimmy the Hawaiian’ Elenga was doing similarly over in Léopoldville, Belgian Congo: his Mi-composé tuning high-swaps the D4str instead: also see Chris Weisman’s 2008 ‘Inverted‘ layout, which takes the octave-shuffling to greater extremes).

 

Edenton secured the new tuning’s reputation on cuts such as the Everly Brothers 1957/8 Bye, Bye Love and Wake Up Little Suzie – and this ‘high-strung’ concept soon spread across his fretboard, eventually resulting in the Nashville layout’s four-string bass-side raise. He trialled the latter tuning from the early 1960s onwards – hear him put it to use on tracks such as Anita Carter’s Once Around The Briar Patch.

 

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• Ray Edenton (from Session Men: Nashville’s A Team):

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“We might do a pop session in the morning, then a country session, then bluegrass, then jazz, all in one day…You had to learn real quick, and you had to adapt real quick. If you couldn’t do that, you couldn’t do sessions. I’ve known several fantastic musicians who couldn’t play sessions. When the red light came on, they froze…” (Ray Edenton)

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Since used on countless classics from Nashville and beyond. A haphazard selection of examples from over the years: Kansas (Dust in the Wind), The Stooges (Gimme Danger), The Smiths (The Headmaster Ritual, Half a Person), Andy Fairweather Low (Wide Eyed & Legless), Elliott Smith (Tomorrow Tomorrow), Chris Isaak (Wicked Game), The Replacements (Skyway), James McMurtry (South Dakota), and Steven Wilson (Drive Home, Routine, The Watchmaker).

 

The Rolling Stones were also frequent users – e.g. Wild Horses (Mick Taylor’s part) and Jumpin’ Jack Flash (in the immortal Keef’s words, “it gives you the feel of a 12-string without all that boom…and all of the hassle of having to tune 12 strings. It just gives you that octave high G, that pretty little ring”). Also Rush (Closer to the Heart, Entre Nous), and, separately, their guitarist Alex Lifeson on other work (“…I actually recorded a track [Evil and Here to Stay] for John Mayall using only the Nashville-tuned Martin, because I didn’t want to do the standard blues thing”).

 

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• Dust in the Wind – Kansas (1977):

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“Doubling a six-string track in Nashville provides a more severe chorus effect…less clutter in the low end [and] panoramic and processing possibilities…chord voicings can take on a keyboard-like quality…The acoustic guitar itself can adopt attributes associated with other instruments.” (Jimmy Leslie in Guitar Player)

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Pat Metheny adapted it to the baritone register (e.g Phase Dance, Country Poem) – while Frank Gambale’s Antipodean transposition takes a strange MIDI-derived setup of A-D-G-C-E-A (i.e. everything is raised by a fourth, then 1+2str are lowered by an octave). Billy Gibbons recorded the clean rhythm parts on ZZ Top’s 1979 Deguello album with only the 6-5-4str raised up (he nicknamed this arrangement ‘Cheater’s 12’) – and David Gilmour put an E1 gauge on his 6str for Pink Floyd’s Hey You, tuned a full 2 octaves up (…kinda like a ‘hyper-banjo’).

 

Also see the aforementioned Mi-Composé tuning, which raises only 4str (and read about the adventures of its creator in 1950s Kinshasa). And, for an altogether different approach to ‘12-strings-in-6’, check out my article on Double-siding (i.e. putting a capo high up the neck, and plucking on ‘both sides of the bar’, emulating a 12-string microtonal harp). Similarly, don’t hesitate to apply Nashville-style ideas to other altered tunings – if you’re stringing high, you may as well wind around while you’re up there…

 

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• Phase Dance – Pat Metheny (1989):

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“[Nashville] was initially a studio trick, [to] sound like a really large 12-string…I thought, ‘Maybe I’ll try that with the Baritone’…It instantly came alive….opens up a whole different set of possibilities” (Pat Metheny)

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• NUMBERS •

	6str	5str	4str	3str	2str	1str
Note	E	A	D	G	B	E
Alteration	+12	+12	+12	+12	0	0
Tension (%)	(-)	(-)	(-)	(-)	0	0
Freq. (Hz)	165	220	294	392	247	330
Pattern (>)	5	5	5	4	5	–
Semitones	0	5	10	15	7	12
Intervals	1	4	b7	b3	5	1

• 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…

• Gambale (this -7): Antipodean transposition is a 5th down
• Mi-composé (this with 3/5/6 -12): only a high 4str
• Jack’s Chikari: an even more radical side-swapping

• MORE INFO •

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

• Ray Edenton’s sessioneering: more on the evolution of his tunings in a Wheal Alice article (“With fingerpicked chords, a Nashville-strung guitar can sound rather like an autoharp, or even suggest an ethereal keyboard effect”) – and on his life in a MHOF video interview, and the aforementioned Nashville Sound profile (“Ray Edenton’s first instrument was a ‘waiter’: a metal serving tray on which he rapped his knuckles in time to the music. He then learned fiddle, and from there went to a 4-string tenor banjo tuned to guitar pitch. He started working local square dances for 25 cents a night. In 1946, after a stint in the army, Ray joined the Rodeo Rangers…[in] 1952, Ray came to Nashville and ran into Sleepy McDaniels, who helped him land a job as guitarist and frontman with blackface comics Jamup & Honey…” [n.b. learn about the genuine Black history of the banjo in my G-G-D-G-B-D tuning writeup: in fact, blackface partly arose as a racist parody of the genuine reputation garnered by African American traditions for their skill on the instrument…in some senses, a strange inversion of today’s similarly reductive stereotyping of ‘banjo’ with ‘backwards white folk’]
• Nashville tales: read more about the musical histories of Tennessee’s state capital via Music City (“Nashville’s first ‘celebrity’, the noted frontiersman and Congressman Davy Crockett, was known far and wide for his colorful stories and fiddle playing. As the 1800s unfolded, Nashville grew to become a national center for music publishing. The first around-the-world tour by a musical act was by the Fisk Jubilee Singers from Nashville’s Fisk University…”), and an interview with Grand Ole Opry legend Jean Shepard (“You can only write so many songs about cheating, drinking, and divorce…I really would like to hear more fiddles and steel guitars on the new artists’ records. I understand that the days of Webb Pierce, Carl Smith, and all of the great country music artists of the past, are gone, but there was no blaring guitars or loud drums to take away from the singers back then. Maybe I’m ‘ole hat’, but I am happy with the music of yesterday…”)

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Header image: Edenton’s Plays Uptown Country Music album (1966)