Lou’s GuitarLou Barlow is not a great guitar player (I think he’d even agree), but he su
Lou’s GuitarLou Barlow is not a great guitar player (I think he’d even agree), but he sure is unique. It’s partly his style, which blends percussiveness and jangly-ness. (You can see something similar in his approach to bass in Dinosaur Jr.) But there’s an oft-overlooked secret to Lou’s playing and songwriting: alternate tunings. Lots of guitarists have eschewed standard tuning to great effect. Fripp’s ‘new standard’ tuning, Joni Mitchell’s and Nick Drake’s open tunings, Keith Richard’s 5-string open-G. Barlow’s whole approach to songwriting has been shaped by his adoption of not only weird tunings, but a weird guitar. His earliest songs were written on a 4-string bass ukulele, which he would mess with until he found a tuning that just sounded good. He often lamented how he had to transpose his idiosyncratic 4-string chord structures to standard 6-string guitar to play live early on. But this loses some of the overtones and resonances that made the songs what they are. But – as Barlow tells it – one night on tour, Tony Iommi came to him in a dream and whispered: “Twelve String Guitar”. The next day, at a music shop Lou sees a 12-string Gretsch hollow-body with an ankh on the headstock – a cosmic reference to Iommi. And so Barlow’s new set up is born.On tour when playing electric, Lou plays a 6-string 4-string 12-string guitar: it’s a 4-string guitar tuning, with the lowest two strings doubled in octaves, on a 12-string body. I’ve never heard of anything like it, but whatever works. There’s surprisingly little out there on Barlow’s tunings (compared with, say, how Pavement fans have prodigiously catalogued all of Malkmus’ weird tunings). I’m not proficient enough to work out all of Lou’s tunings, but I think it’d be a service to the music community to list what I’ve found. Here’s a list of tuning’s Lou has messed with:D# G C d#DADED# A# G d#C# G# c# d# -- source link
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