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I was just watching the "Today Show" this morning, which had the "Goo Goo Dolls" as their musical feature.

I happened to notice that their lead singer, who was playing an acoustic guitar, was using some suspicious left hand fingerings. In fact, on closer inspection, he was playing some chords without any fingers at all! No guitar expert, I, but according to my calculations, that should produce a chord of E-A-D-G-B-E! E minor7, with an A suspension? Either they are much more harmonically adventurous than I would have thought, or the guy was completely faking!

Anybody know about this group? Does he just use a guitar as a prop?

.....just curious.

Could be the guitar is alternate or open tuned. Pretty common these days.

kegmcnabb wrote:Could be the guitar is alternate or open tuned. Pretty common these days.

It could be tuned to an open D chord. That would be tuned from low to high D A D F# A D. A very popular tuning with the younger country and pop singers.

Open tunings are very common with acoustic players and have been for a long, long time. It facilitates certain types of playing, particularly for slide guitar and rhythm guitarists. Keith Richards has played in open tuning much of his career. Most of Duane Allman's best slide playing was done in open tuning. Many guitarists play quite fluently in both open tunings and classical technique and switch between them easily.

Some other common tunings: e-b-e-g#-b-e, d-g-d-g-b-d, e-a-e-a-c#-e

bloke wrote: Surely musical giants such as the Goo Goo Dolls would not resort to such blaspheming as to subjugate classic guitar technique to "open tuning"...nor to possibly play along with some sort of pre-recorded performance...

bloke "particularly not on the Today Show, where truth - philosophical, artistic, and otherwise - always prevails "

LOVVL. In fact, I can't stop laughing.

Reminds me of the radio interview I heard with the bass (guitar) player of a Swedish girl band. The interviewer asked her how long she'd been playing. "Six weeks" was the answer.

She'd started out by attaching little colored pieces of tape to the fingerboard at strategic positions and making a script for the song (it wasn't clear if she could read standard notation) that essentially said "at this word, use the blue fingering". Two weeks into rehearsals, they cut a hit CD.

At the time of the interview, she was proud of not needing the tape any more.

Think about that the next time you sit down to practice your Arban's...

bloke wrote:But Chuck, the bass guitar (and believe me I KNOW because in a past life, I played it for a living!) is d*mn complicated...four strings X 24 fret positions X 4 fingers in the left hand X (at least) 2 fingers in the right hand = (at least) seven hundred some-odd possibilities

You're right--and remembering that business about when to play I, IV or V can be pretty taxing on the ol' noggin, too...

Chuck(G) wrote:At the time of the interview, she was proud of not needing the tape any more.

Think about that the next time you sit down to practice your Arban's...

And they used to kid me in the symphony about my color coded parts. One time, when I came back on stage, they thought they'd pull a prank on me and switched the order of the colors on the keys on my tuba. I showed them, though! I just played the colors like they had changed them! There weren't too many people in the hall when we were finished...

I guess this is NOT the thread to go on about my custom designed (by myself using my TI-30 calculator from high school) and built fanned fret bass....

Uhh, why do you think most of the "big boys" play silver plated 6/4 CC's and laquered (or raw) F's??? Its COLOR CODING, man!!

iiipopes wrote:I guess this is NOT the thread to go on about my custom designed (by myself using my TI-30 calculator from high school) and built fanned fret bass....

Have you heard of the Novak Fanned Fret System used on Dingwall bass guitars? I believe the 5 strings go from a 34" scale on the G string to a 37" on the B.