E-B-E-Gb-B-E

• OVERVIEW •

Though rare, this Esus2 layout’s distinctive ‘major 2nd in the middle‘ opens up unique melodic and harmonic possibilities. Most famously used for the droning shoegaze wails of My Bloody Valentine’s Only Shallow.

 

Given the snappability of the raised 4+5str, acoustic steel-stringers are best advised to transpose everything down a tone to ‘DADEAD’ (just one twist away from the famous DADGAD). Feel how the centre-zone narrowness (3-4str) forces you to find new voicings…

Pattern: 7>5>2>5>5

Harmony: Esus2 | 1-5-1-2-5-1

• TUNING TONES •

• SOUNDS •

The opening track of Loveless, MBV’s Only Shallow – written by Kevin Shields and Bilinda Butcher – remains the band’s best-known and best-loved song. A 2018 Sound on Sound retrospective goes into intriguing detail on just how Shields cooked up its textures:

 

“[He] had something of a eureka moment with a ’60s Burman amp and Fender Showman. ‘I set them up facing each other with one microphone in the middle…with the tremolo going…So the base sound of the thing was these two amps with the tremolos shaking at different rates. I overdubbed that, so you had four different rates of tremolo. Then I sampled it in the Akai and played it backwards, so it was backwards and forwards at the same time – and then played it an octave higher'”.

 

Users on the RateYourMusic site offer florid personal descriptions of how they hear the track: “that curdled mobius strip of a riff opening up into the dizzy endless space of the verses”, “using a tremolo bar during chord strumming…a subtle and odd choice which is nonetheless easily observable”, “opening with a snare fill that gives way to a pummeling wall of noise…seethes and surges with layer upon layer…disorienting, but strangely hypnotic” (also: “lol only shallow is 4:20“).

 

---

• Only Shallow – My Bloody Valentine (1991):

---

“Sleep as a pillow, comfort there,
Where she won’t dare, anywhere,
Look in the mirror, she’s not there,
Where she won’t care, somewhere…”

---

 

The same Esus2 layout also turns up on the loose, sliding electric part of John Mayer’s Something’s Missing. And on acoustic, check out the flowing steel-string arpeggios of Alex de Grassi’s Causeway (-2) – recorded in 1979, over a decade before the release of Loveless.

 

---

• Causeway – Alex de Grassi (1979):

---

“My grandfather came to the U.S. from Northern Italy in 1913…His first instrument was a cigar-box with a sawed-off broom handle and rubber band stretched across it…He played [violin] with the San Francisco Symphony, taught music at UC Berkeley, and had his own string quartet. When I first started playing guitar at 13, he’d say ‘You gotta learn how to do more than strum a few chords if you want to get serious…'” (Alex De Grassi)

---

• NUMBERS •

	6str	5str	4str	3str	2str	1str
Note	E	B	E	Gb	B	E
Alteration	0	+2	+2	-1	0	0
Tension (%)	0	+26	+26	-11	0	0
Freq. (Hz)	82	123	165	185	247	330
Pattern (>)	7	5	2	5	5	–
Semitones	0	7	12	14	19	24
Intervals	1	5	1	2	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…

• Open Em (this with 3str +1): one twist to go minor
• Open E (this with 3str +2): and one more for major
• Haja’s Bb: a wider way to arrange a sus2 sequence

• MORE INFO •

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

• MBV’s tunings: learn more about their madcap layouts in my Altered-tuned Artists article – and for fuller listings, check out the heroic compilation efforts of Reddit user mbvtunings4u, as well as discussion on the Simple Machines forum (“Jesus, that is draining to write up. I know some of the rhythms are ambiguous here, but all the chords are right: to my knowledge…”)
• Making of Loveless: the groundbreaking album’s creation (and subsequent remastering) was far from straightforward – find out more in a 2017 Rolling Stone retrospective with Kevin Shields, and also a 1992 Alan DiPerna Guitar World feature (“In some distant galaxy, some three-headed beings are probably gathered around a methane trisulfate campfire at this very moment, singing the latest intergalactic pop hit. And it probably sounds not unlike something off Loveless…”)

---

Header image: MBV’s many-pedalled setup in action