Breaking Up with Open Tuning: A Slide Guitarist's Story

I fell in love with slide guitar in open tuning… and spent years trying to escape it

A Battered Acoustic and a Blues Tune

I fell in love with slide guitar in Open G — playing Muddy Waters’ “I Can’t Be Satisfied” on a battered old acoustic in the south of France. I had no clue what I was doing, but it was raw, exciting, and occasionally even in tune (!)

Enter David Tronzo

As time went on, I always kept a guitar set up for slide. But everything changed when I went to Boston and landed in David Tronzo’s slide lab — unexpectedly. I’d gone to study jazz, not slide. But Tronzo’s radical approach in standard tuning completely rewired how I thought about the guitar.

I got the bug - studied regularly with Tronzo privately, collared him in every office hour and just couldn’t get enough of the sound and the musical doors it opened for me. He became and remains my principal musical mentor.

(If somehow you haven’t heard of Tronzo, it’s because he’s one of the most criminally overlooked musicians alive.)

The Open C Obsession

Later, I studied regularly with Joey Landreth, diving deep into Open C, For 2-3 years, I only played in standard tuning when teaching – everything else was in Open C. I made it my mission to re-learn the guitar in this tuning - I didn’t want to just play ‘in’ the tuning, I wanted to relearn the guitar inside it - all my chord vocabulary, fretboard knowledge and improvising language and transfer it into this new world of Open C.

To give myself a push, I formed a duo with a great singer Jo Kelsey, and set a goal of learning 3 hours’ worth of jazz and blues repertoire ion Open C to gig with. Which I did, and we happily gigged it for a few years.

My Slide Guitar Paradox

But somewhere along the way, I realised something strange: I was working hard to make my playing not sound like open tuning. I wasn’t using slide to sound like a “slide guitarist” — I was using it to challenge myself. To reframe harmony and melody. To hear differently.

Coming Full Circle

So, I’ve now come full circle – I play in standard tuning, with a fairly regular setup, so I can play conventional guitar too if I wish. I use all my guitars, I generally keep my sound relatively simple, using very few effects, and I listen to and am inspired by a wide range of musicians on every instrument.

I’m improvising, composing, and listening more broadly than ever. I’m inspired, and curiously diving deep into my own musical world – it doesn’t get better than that!

How about you?

Have you wrestled with tunings, technique, or identity in your playing? I’d love to hear your thoughts — drop a comment or reply.