Songwriting and the guitar

This article by Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers in Acoustic Guitar magazine includes 21 songwriting tips from Paul Simon, Elvis Costello, Joni Mitchell, David Wilcox and others, as well as example videos and tabs.

Here’s tip 5, just to whet your appetite.

5. TUNE DOWN. Conversely, you can lower the tuning of all the strings a half step or a whole step to put the guitar into a less familiar range while still being able to play normal fingerings. When I was a beginning guitarist trying to learn “Yesterday,” I wish I’d known that Paul McCartney was playing in standard tuning down a whole step. Instead of wrestling, as I was, with F and Bb barre chords, he used easy key-of-G shapes that sounded in the key of F. Since then I’ve been repeatedly surprised to learn how many songs were written in lowered tunings, from John Fogerty classics (“Proud Mary,” “Bad Moon Rising,” “Fortunate Son”) to more recent tracks by Keller Williams and Ben Harper.

Read the full article here.

Tags: Acoustic Guitar, David Wilcox, Elvis Costello, Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, songwriting