D-D-D-A-D-F^#

• OVERVIEW •

A low-droning variety of Open D, featuring a powerful ‘triple D’ across 6-5-4str: meaning that you have to move vertically (i.e. up and down the neck) to generate melodic motion. Famously used by Peter Frampton on Wind of Change (a semitone down) – although he got the idea via browsing George Harrison’s private guitar collection (more below!). While certainly peculiar, its root-stacked design is in fact closer to familiar territory than it might initially look: the interval structure suggests our classic Dmaj shape from EADGBE (‘…0-2-3-2’) – and if you move Open C up a tone, and leave 5str at its usual A, you arrive here.

 

The top end is extremely high: either restring light, transpose down, or pray vigorously to the gods of string-snapping fate (...I reckon try Apollo first: the lyre-playing, bow-toting Greek god of music, archery, dance, truth, sunlight, and more – who even, it is fabled, once had a murderous run-in with Boreas, the bearer of cold Winter winds from the North. Far from being frigid, Boreas is said to have slain Apollo’s favourite lover Hyacinthus in a fit of jealous rage – by blowing Apollo’s powerful discus throw right towards his exposed neck. Although I guess they must have made up eventually, as Boreas later fathered ‘three giant Hyperborean priests‘, who worshipped Apollo while ruling over the realms of eternal Spring with his blessing. Anyway…).

Pattern: 0-12-7-5-4

Harmony: Dmaj | 1-1-1-5-1-3

• TUNING TONES •

• SOUNDS •

Frampton originally came across the tuning while browsing George Harrison’s guitar collection – part of a broader period of multi-tuned exploration (particularly inspired by Joni Mitchell‘s innovations). In his words, “it’s a very strange tuning, but oh my God, it sounds huge“.

 

The original Wind of Change cut, released as the title track of Frampton’s first solo album in 1972, is commonly cited as being in D-D-D-A-D-F^#: e.g. Wikipedia quotes from a Frampton interview as follows: “the low E and A strings drop down to D, the fourth string remains unchanged, the third string goes up to A, the second string up to D, and the first string up to F^#…a D triad on top and three Ds on the bottom”.

 

While this seems legit (and passes the ‘ear test’), I’d also come across other promising suggestions – some good-quality tabs had D-A-D-A-D-F^#, while other sources had D-D-D-F^#-D-F^# and others nearby. Plus, the Wiki quote was unsourced, and hard to track down (partly due to its endless reprints in Wiki-referent articles: well, here’s another I guess…). Thankfully, Frampton cleared up any lingering confusion via a 2015 Tweet:

 

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• (n.b. Trying out the other suggestions is still valuable: e.g. D-A-D-A-D-F^# [5str +7] is the most useful no-restring approximation (essentially turning it into Open C +2) – and D-D-D-F^#-D-F^# [3str -3] simplifies the intervals into closer parallel (‘octave F#s, double-octave Ds’).

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• Wind of Change – Peter Frampton (1972):

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“Sapphires aren’t enough to buy me happiness,
Diamonds don’t demand me, they’re just for looking,
Love comes close to wrecking all you have to give,
God knows, there’s so much to give…“

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Eventually, I managed to trace the mystery Wiki quote to an old Guitar Player interview: “[You also worked with George Harrison. In what ways did his guitar playing influence what you do?] I definitely stole a couple of tunings from him! He used to have acoustic guitars all over his house that were tuned in various ways, and I’d pick them up and say, ‘What the hell is this?’, and then get out my cigarette pack and write down the tuning…The tuning that I remember the most is one that I used myself on Wind of Change. The low E and A strings drop down…”.

 

Frampton added context in a 2016 Relix profile: “Wind of Change was inspired by a guitar tuning that I first heard from Joni Mitchell…I never really knew what tunings she was using, but sort of guesstimated…when I became friends with George Harrison and was working with him, I got to go down to his home and was able to check out the guitars and all the acoustics he had. This one tuning just sort of stuck out to me as being the strangest tuning I’ve ever heard, but it was very full sounding and yet high as well…George…said it was just something he came up with. So I stole it from him, and took it home!“.

 

Later he reflected that “Wind Of Change is the only song I ever wrote with this particular tuning. It’s got a real different kind of sound. It’s amazing to think about where it all came from“. I wonder if we’ll ever get any closer to its ultimate source: e.g. on some as-yet-unsurfaced home demo tape by Harrison. Either way, Frampton himself regularly revisited the tuning, track, and tale behind it in his live shows for years to come:

 

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• Wind of Change origin tale – Peter Frampton (2016):

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“I don’t think I was a very good [art] student, because I was always thinking about guitars and drawing them, or tracing them out of magazines. It was a total obsession. I was a junkie for a guitar…School was always secondary for me, unfortunately. I guess if I’d paid more attention…” (Peter Frampton)

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• NUMBERS •

	6str	5str	4str	3str	2str	1str
Note	D	D	D	A	D	Gb
Alteration	-2	-7	0	+2	+3	+2
Tension (%)	-21	-55	0	+26	+41	+26
Freq. (Hz)	73	73	147	220	294	370
Pattern (>)	0	12	7	5	4	–
Semitones	0	0	12	19	24	28
Intervals	1	1	1	5	1	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…

• Open D: like 4str here becomes 6str, starting D-A-D-F#
• Open C: mirrors the intervallic pattern at the high end
• Ostrich: if you like adjacent Ds, why not have them all?

• MORE INFO •

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

• Frampton’s music: track & tuning chat on a 2005 GuitarZone thread, more on his epic Frampton Comes Alive album, and the aforementioned Guitar Player interview – also read about his jams with classmate David Jones in the school stairwell: later famous as David Bowie (they remained friends, and in 1987 would collaborate, extricate each other from a plane fire, and wander around Madrid together searching for beer)
• More changing winds: delve into the conspiratorial histories of another track with the same title – Wind of Change by The Scorpions, released in 1990 – claimed by some reputable sources to have been secretly penned by the CIA to help destabilise the crumbling Soviet Union (“…previously best-known for their Spinal Tap-esque album covers…the song’s rallying call of rapprochement was embraced by Eastern Europeans as the iron curtain rusted away. But what if this unlikely twist in the group’s career masked an even stranger truth?”)

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Header image: Peter Frampton’s I’m in You album art (1977)