D-D-D-D-D-D

• OVERVIEW •

A ‘one-note drone’ tuning – comprising nothing but D tones. If you ignore octave-scatterings, these ‘monotonal’ arrangements can be classified as ‘trivially repetitive‘: referencing the ‘optimal simplicity’ of the note set (=triviality), and the ‘ever-looping’ sequence of tones (=repetitiveness). However, despite this apparent purity, the tuning’s true magic arises from the chaos that necessarily accompanies it in the real world. In the abstract, a one-note layout is about as consonant as it gets – but when you set it to the fretboard, things get messy…

 

Most obviously, a standard-strung guitar can’t achieve true unison. A steel 6str is 4 to 5 times thicker than the 1str, precluding the possibility of them both reaching any shared open note without either snapping or falling inaudibly slack. So, unless you restring, you have to shuffle in a couple of octave jumps somewhere (here, between 6>5str and 3>2str: in the manner of Lou Reed’s oddball pre-fame track The Ostrich).

 

And, no matter how you arrange things, the resulting blend is still going to involve some strange loose/taut combinations. These differing tensions present intonation instabilities (see ‘inharmonicity‘), shattering and recolouring the unison’s supposed purity. The drastic simplification forces us to think rhythmically and vertically (i.e. up-and-down the neck) – and harmonies become imbued with chaotic phasing effects.

Pattern: 12>0>0>12>0

Harmony: (pure D) | 1-1-1-1-1-1

• TUNING TONES •

• SOUNDS •

In avant-garde circles, the tuning is often named for its association with The Ostrich – a bizarre 1964 track by Lou Reed about a fictional dance craze (“get down on your face…put your hands up, upside your knees”). Far Out recounts the tale: “Before Lou Reed became a songwriting sensation…he worked as the in-house musician for Pickwick Records…churning out ten-a-penny records for supermarkets and convenience stores. During this time, he wrote a joke song called ‘The Ostrich’ as a way of spoofing [Chubby Checker’s hit] The Twist…Originally only a studio side-project, the track…grabbed enough interest to put together a band [The Primitives] for a few live gigs…”

 

Reed himself expanded on the tuning’s inception in a 2004 Louder Sound interview: “I’d taken a guitar and tuned all the strings to the same note. I did that because I saw this guy called Jerry Vance [a Pickwick staffer] do that…not an advanced avant-garde guy, he was just screwing around. And he didn’t realise what he had – but I did, and I took that and made it into The Ostrich. Then they wanted to have a group…So this guy went out to a party to find people with long hair, and he brought in [John] Cale…Tony Conrad, and Walter De Maria…”

 

(n.b. Alex Petridis points out that Reed’s riff was probably “pinch[ed] from The Crystals’ Then He Kissed Me“, a hit from the previous year. And, according drummer Moe Tucker, the ‘Ostrich guitar’ he played it on was a de-fretted model of some kind – which was stolen without trace soon after the session.)

 

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• The Ostrich – The Primitives (1960):

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“Hey, put your hands up, upside your knees,
Now do the ostrich! Do the ostrich!
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Hey, take this forward, and step on your head…”

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The tuning particularly piqued Cale’s ear – the young Welshman likened it to his guru La Monte Young‘s droning tanpura experiments. The pair soon formed their own band – which became the Velvet Underground. Mike Daley’s 2016 paper Ostrich Tuning as an Aesthetic Point of Articulation describes the tuning’s catalysing role here: “By virtue of its possibilities – and perhaps even more importantly its limitations, [Ostrich] offered a common area where Lou Reed’s primitivist rock-and-roll aesthetic and Cale’s minimalist approach could meet.”

 

Controversy still persists over which other Underground tracks the tuning may have made it onto. Many fan-compiled sources (including GTDB and Wikipedia) list it for All Tomorrow’s Parties and Venus in Furs, with others also being speculated. However, Brian Gough convincingly argues that it only appeared on the first of these (plus an outside chance for Lady Godiva’s Operation) – based on detailed transcription, examination of tour footage, and analysis of other Reed tunings (e.g Run Run Run [DGCFAA], and Rock’n’Roll [CGCFAD: although p.110 of Joe Harvard’s Underground book notes that “Reed has…cited Rock and Roll as…benefit[ting] from the Ostrich tuning” – maybe for live takes?).

 

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• Ostrich Tuning: Debunking the Myth – Brian Gough (2020)

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“Mick Wall: and all the tossers out there who think they know…this is the truth: there’s no Ostrich guitar in Venus in Furs!” (Brian Gough)

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Reed himself would return to Ostrich-style territory on his gratingly controvertial solo album Metal Machine Music (1975): “I’d tune all the strings, say to E, put the guitar a certain distance from the amp, and it would start feeding back. The harmonics would start mixing, going into something else…as if the guitar was hitting itself!”. Joe Harvard’s aforementioned book also notes that “Jonathan Richman distinctly recalls Lou showing him an all-B version as well“.

 

Similar tunings have also been employed by various Underground associates too: e.g. early collaborator Henry Flynt, a Fluxus-aligned philosopher and ‘avant-garde hillbilly artist’ who, it is rumoured, received a couple of Ostrich-tuned guitar lessons from Reed in lieu of cash payment for filling in for Cale on violin one evening (Uncle Sam Do).

 

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• Classic rock but it’s in ‘DDDDDD’ tuning – BLOXY (2013):

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“The miniscule tattoo I got in 1979 caused a family furore, with dark rumblings about bikers and convicts – when my niece recently acquired skin art that would impress most Yakuza…nary a peep was uttered. American culture moves so fast it’s more a verb than a noun…” (Joe Harvard)

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A seemingly separate lineage sprung up around English sessioneer Mike Leander, who used ‘AAAAAA‘ on Rock & Roll Pt. II & I by now-disgraced glam artist Gary Glitter [n.b. I sometimes see it referred to as ‘Gary Glitter tuning’ on old forum posts: safe to say that this name can now be permanently retired…also, shouldn’t it have been ‘Leander’ tuning anyway?]

 

Fellow studio maestro Joe Gore discusses the continuation of Leander’s concepts: “I bought a crappy plywood Baldwin Virginian for $100…standard [gauges], but with each string raised or lowered to the nearest A”. He mentions learning it “from [PJ] Harvey, who wrote several songs in this tuning, including Goodnight, which I got to play with her on tour…It sounds wicked, but only if you don’t mind an extremely wobbly intonation experience…[6+1str] flap like sails in a hurricane“.

 

More recently, Japanese online star Ichika Nito has used higher transpositions of EEEEEE and FFFFFF – the former matching Soundgarden’s configuration for Mind Riot – and similar mono-drones may also have been used by noise artists Throbbing Gristle (e.g. Six Six Sixties). And, in some sense, anyone who plays a single-string ‘unitar‘ is by definition using the ‘condensed’ version of this tuning (e.g. Jamaica’s Brushy One-String, and before him, the striking style of Eddie ‘One String’ Jones).

 

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• Rollin’ & Tumblin’ – Eddie ‘One-String’ Jones (1960)

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“Jones was holding a rough-cut 2-by-4 plank: a homemade one-stringed instrument of the crudest construction. After a bit of cajoling from Usher, Jones reached into his pocket and fished out…a half-pint whiskey bottle to slide with, and a carefully whittled stick to bang the single string with…The sound was raw, jangly, and chaotic…Jones’ technique with the stick gave the music an otherworldly edge…[Usher] ran back home as fast as he could to grab his portable tape recorder…” (Cub Koda on Eddie ‘One-String’ Jones)

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—Why even keep your roots in tune? Global ideas from my Audio Glossary:

 

‘Imperfect Root‘: Refers to the deliberate inclusion of a ‘nudged root note’ – i.e. the base note of the scale, when actually performed, does not ring out at exactly zero cents. While this may seem like a contradiction in terms, it is only incoherent when considered in the abstract: although the maths behind creating tuning systems may assume a zero-cent root, the actual root-positioned notes we play can deviate from any otherwise-implied ‘home tone’ (e.g. pressing the 6str a little too hard, or tuning a little flat of an accompanying A440 instrument: also see ‘inharmonicity‘).

 

For example, Indian rudra veena master Bahauddin Dagar employs ‘seven shades of Sa‘: deliberately intoning the root swara of some ragas with pitches other than the precise pitch of the background drone – selected to enhance each scale’s unique tensions, while also taking reference from the daily arc of the sun (see below: and read my interview with him here). In this sense, an ‘imperfect root’ functions more like a melodic scale tone, rather than as a starting point for constructing a tuning system – perhaps revealing a little of the ambiguity behind how we use words like ‘root’…

 

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• Seven Shades of Sa – Bahauddin Dagar (2010):

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“Learning is not just technique; it has to be a way of life. We cannot compromise the veena’s rituals, even if we die of hunger.” (Bahauddin Dagar)

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• NUMBERS •

	6str	5str	4str	3str	2str	1str
Note	D	D	D	D	D	D
Alteration	-2	+5	0	-5	+3	-2
Tension (%)	-21	(-)	0	-44	+41	-21
Freq. (Hz)	73	147	147	147	294	294
Pattern (>)	12	0	0	12	0	–
Semitones	0	12	12	12	24	24
Intervals	1	1	1	1	1	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…

• Iris: adding a single low B tone changes everything
• Wind of Change: keeping four of the six droning Ds
• Carnatic Drone: interspersing the drones with fifths

• MORE INFO •

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

• Ostrich guitars: more detail in Joe Harvard’s 2004 Velvet Underground & Nico book, and Mike Daley’s 2016 paper Ostrich Tuning as an Aesthetic Point of Articulation – plus contextual and playing chat on Reddit covering similar concepts (“When I got my first guitar…this asshole at the music store sells me six identical strings. I played guitar with six unison strings and two drumsticks. After a week or two I learned about Standard tuning and open chords when I found a Salvation Army songbook…”)
• Reed’s Underground: amidst his musical achievments, read more about the role of Reed’s traumatic electroshock treatment and serious personal controversies (“once, he gave her a black eye, so she swung back at him: ‘It was pretty clear to me that the only way he would ever stop doing that was if I did it to him, so he’d have to walk on stage with a black eye’…”)

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Header image: why bury a smile like this in the sand?