C-G-C-G-C-F

• OVERVIEW •

Csus4 tuning, also known as C ‘Modal’, is the ‘suspended’ variant of the Open C family, with a perfect 4th at the top. This gives each side of the guitar a very different physical feel – unless you re-string, the high end gets tight and loud, while the low end falls looser and quieter. Use the quirks of this spectrum to your advantage!

 

It offers an ultra-wide open-string span of 29 semitones (equivalent to having an extra string added to Standard) – and no adjacent strings are separated by less than 5 semitones, providing an ideal geometry for open, expansive music. Use the two-tone regularity of 6-2str for some droning resonance.

Pattern: 7>5>7>5>5

Harmony: Csus4 | 1-5-1-5-1-4

• TUNING TONES •

• SOUNDS •

Several songs by versatile fingerpicker Kelly Joe Phelps (e.g. Beggar’s Oil and River Rat Jimmy, both cp.2). An ‘Artists of the Decade’ feature in Acoustic Guitar magazine recounts his path to discovering the tuning: “Drawing on his free-jazz background, he moved quickly past the traditional blues vocabulary, though in a way that tapped into the spirit of the old masters…As the decade progressed, he did the same with his non-slide playing: eventually settling on CGCGCF as his standard tuning” [n.b. I think he’s always had at least several on the go…].

 

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• River Rat Jimmy – Kelly Joe Phelps (2012):

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“Drums are still playing,
I can see them marching close,
This he walks like a shadow,
That he dances like a ghost,
The one that looks like Jimmy,
Lord, he scares me the most
River Rat Jimmy and Jehoshaphat…”

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The tuning is scattered elsewhere, generally turning up on the acoustic guitar: e.g. the accompanying steel-string part on Steve Vai’s Dyin’ Day, and the neo-Baroque fingerpicking of John Renbourn’s Bourrée I & II.

 

It also appears to have featured in the teaching practices of globally-minded acoustic artist Isaac Guillory (who likely picked it up via Renbourn, with whom he collaborated on occasion). As recounted by his student Richard Peikoff: “The University [of London] had some great acoustic stairwells…I was working in several guitar tunings at the time, [including] CGCGCF: which I used when I studied with sarod [Hindustani fretless lute] teacher Ratnakar Vyas. The beautiful echos of the stairwells inspired the development of many compositions”. Similarly

 

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• Bourrée I & II – John Renbourn (1979):

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“Folk was a strange kind of word that came in, almost like a media buzz-word…there was a ‘folk’ movement [of] people trying to revive the British tradition of very po-faced stuff, and opening up so-called ‘relaxed’ clubs and pubs – where they were actually torturing people with academic versions of folk songs that they could hardly sing properly – and a bunch of people like myself and Mac [McLeod] hated all that…” (John Renbourn)

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Similarly, transpositions of the tuning were used by North Indian fretless guitar virtuoso Vasant Rai, usually as B-Gb-B-Gb-B-E: similar to his main instrument the sarod. In his own words, ‘Inspiration comes through many things. I like all good music from any part of the world. Each of my compositions is different – not jazz, not rock, not classical…”.

 

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• Darbari – Vasant Rai (1981):

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“Born in North Gujarat, Vasant began musical education at age 7, and appeared in his first concert at age 11. He recalls the experience: ‘At that time, I had the idea that one who knows many instruments is a good musician – so I practised violin, sitar, flute, voice, dilruba, and tabla’. In 1958, Vasant became the sarod disciple of Allauddin Khan, residing in his house for 8 years, and was the last student to receive the maestro’s complete musical training. Later, Vasant experimented with the ‘sur-guitar’, a fretless sarod–guitar hybrid of his own invention: ‘When I first tried guitar, I knew I could play Indian music on it…I took off the fretboard, and glued a metal fingerboard in its place’. Vasant also appeared with Carlos Santana and John McLaughlin, and was perhaps best known for his remarkable series of East-West improvisations recorded with the group Oregon…” (Vasant Rai’s Fretless Guitar)

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NUMBERS

	6str	5str	4str	3str	2str	1str
Note	C	G	C	G	C	F
Alteration	-4	-2	-2	0	+1	+1
Tension (%)	-37	-21	-21	0	+12	+12
Freq. (Hz)	65	98	131	196	262	349
Pattern (>)	7	5	7	5	5	–
Semitones	0	7	12	19	24	29
Intervals	1	5	1	5	1	4

• 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 C (this with 1str -1): the major variant
• All Fourths: logical layout with the same ‘high side’
• Hejira: another Csus, but ‘slack on both sides’

• MORE INFO •

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

• Kelly Joe Phelps: I can hardly recommend the late KJP’s music highly enough – aside from those above, listen to performances such as Piece by Piece, The House Carpenter, Goodnight Irene (on a lap slide), and Roll Away the Stone (on a differentially-tuned 12-string) – and also read an illuminating selection of reviews and interviews on Anything Matters (“Phelps invested a good deal of time in jazz, playing for about a decade in Washington and Oregon. Then he dropped out. ‘I kind of stopped, but I kind of moved forward, as well. When I first got into jazz, I was playing all that standard material, you know, bebop tunes, Charlie Parker…The more I got into the freer side of that music, the less I was attached to the more straight-ahead stuff. Once that freedom was laid down, I was able to borrow from lots of different influences…[and] I found myself wanting to play in an improvised manner, but a more folk kind of music…'”)
• Isaac Guillory’s modal experiments: To expand on the quote above – from his student Richard Peikoff, the international axeman of mystery was “an American ex-patriot living in London. He was a maverick of sorts, a Renaissance man…an extremely talented player…The University [of London] had some great acoustic stairwells, and I used to practice in them before and after classes…I was working in several guitar tunings at the time: Standard, Drop D, DADGAD, EAC#EAE, and CGCGCF – which I used when I studied with sarod [North Indian fretless lute] teacher Ratnakar Vyas” – read a Guardian obituary for more, and listen to Guillory’s chops on Swinging Little Guitar Man, Buckets of Rain (a duet with John Renbourn), and his 1974 Old Grey Whistle Test appearance (“the first song is called Cyborgs of America…”)

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Header image: acoustic master Kelly Joe Phelps (R.I.P.)