Check out this Metal Guitar Lesson on Drop D Tuning – How to Tune in Drop D. Guitar Control founder and instructor Claude Johnson demonstrates how to use the Drop D tuning so get that signature metal sound. Step by step video and instruction and the free tabs make this an easy upgrade to your guitar playing and sound. Enjoy!
Introduction
Hey its Claude Johnson here with GuitarControl.com and we’re going to do a quick mini lesson today on drop D tuning and playing metal riffs. So drop D means I’m taking my low E string and I’ve tuned it down to a D, so it matches this…
Playing In Drop D
All right real simple you’re getting two Ds, usually do it by here, just play your D and E… Okay so here’s the cool thing about this tuning when it comes to metal is these one finger power chords, it’s just the bottom three strings on any fret. You know usually with a power chord you get this shape in standard tuning… but if you look at the notes D-A-D it’s the same thing.
Now let’s get to the rhythm of this and I’m just going to give you a disclaimer, I’m not really a metal guy, I don’t play a lot of metal, but I’m going to show you. Also if you aren’t really into metal, we have a lot of great metal teachers, I’m just going to target metal. Alright so that’s out of the way, let me just give you a couple of basic things; first of all you just start on the basic open D power chord and you do a triplet rhythm, so instead of your usual 1 2 3 4 now it’s just going to be 1 2 3 1 2 3.
Now notice I’m emphasizing the one little bit harder, one two three, I’m also using a little bit of palm muting here. Let’s pick up the speed a little bit; I’m also just kind of just hitting that one note on the two of three. All right you can mix that up with other chords. So what I’m doing, they’re basically just kind of almost playing at the bridge so you can play the triplets on any of those.
Another cool thing is you can alternate back and forth; so what I’m doing there is a paper fretted note and then the open count, the two and three, you can also get some really cool kind of syncopated stuff.
Conclusion
So stuff like that can give me a lot of fun. Try it, let me know what you think. Check the link in the video description for the tabs and again check out GuitarControl.com/metal if you’re into that and you can also check out GuitarControl.com/courses for a list of all the stuff we got. So thanks for watching and I’ll talk to you real soon.
