M. Ward / Alternate Tunings

M. Ward hasn’t played Pittsburgh in years, and this post doesn’t contain any news, mp3s, or other bites of interest to general music fans. Chances are, this post is worthless to you. Guitarists who are into M. Ward may want to read on, or not. It's cool either way.

I’ve had a lot of trouble trying to transcribe M. Ward’s songs over the years. His picking can be complex, but it is usually a standard pattern or something close enough to be faked. The chords themselves, not so much. Watching him live, it’s easy to see he’s using alternate tunings, but that only gets you so far. Based on his affinity for John Fahey, I always figured Ward might use a common open tuning like C. But that didn’t get me anywhere with Transfiguration, and I think open G got me a song or two on Transistor. So I gave up for awhile.

Until a month or so ago. That’s when I finally gave into reliance on good old Google to tackle his latest release, Hold Time. The web told me that Ward had used D6 tuning for “Chinese Translation.” I’d never heard of it. It’s:

D A D F# B D

( 6 5 4 3 2 1 )

So I took that and dug into the new tunes. Turns out he uses it—or D6Add9 (D A D F# B E)—for quite a few on the new record, including “Rave On,” “One Hundred Million Years,” “Shangri La,” and (I think) “Epistemology” and “Fisher of Men.” I also finally figured out “Requiem” after years of knowing it didn’t sound right in standard or drop-D. “Duet for Guitars No. 3,” I’m still not so sure about; that seems to be in open E.

So, that’s all. In the end this post is pretty self-serving. Anyone out there who happens to know any other alternate tunings used by Ward is kindly asked to speak freely in the comments thread, and I thank you in advance.