High Strung Guitar - Nashville Tuning

I learned a nifty new thing recently as I perused the web. Let me just say that it was more than a discovery. It was life-changing... It was life-changing because I had held a grudge against Derek Webb for years after he played a song on a the guitar that I couldn't figure out. If you know me, you know that I can play virtually any song by ear so when someone (like Derek Webb) comes along and plays a song and I can't figure out how he's playing it, my entire self-worth is quickly flushed down the toilet.

What Derek Webb had done was very simple and I have forgiven him now that I know he didn't mean anything against me personally. He was, in fact, just trying to make a song sound cool. It was nothing against me.

Derek used a guitar tuning technique called the "high strung guitar" or, as it has come to be known, "Nashville tuning." All that means it that you replace the top 4 strings (E,A,D,G) with a string an octave higher. That would be the strings that you would normally double up with on a 12-string guitar. Except, in this case, you're doing it on a six-string. It gives the guitar a really light sound that is great for reducing those annoying middle frequencies when you're recording. And you can also play a standard tuned guitar in a different channel which would give the sound of a 12-string but in stereo if you put the channels hard left and hard right.

What ends up happening is that you have only one string that is wound (the low E), all other strings are steel. And you have to get lighter gauge strings of course since you're tuning an octave higher (basically just the gauges of a top four strings of your octave 12-string EADG). Oh, and I've been playing "Piece of Glass" all week on my newly high-strung guitar and feeling quite the equal of Derek Webb, even superior to him.