ARTIE TRAUM

ESSENTIAL DADGAD

FOR BEGINNERS

DVD 1

Guitar Tuition DVD

Here is an easy introduction to DADGAD for those who are new to alternate tunings and want to explore its unique sounds on the guitar. It brings beautiful progressions, unique chords, ringing open strings and rich tones to your playing. In his "guided tour," guitarist Artie Traum shows you how to retune your guitar quickly and easily, form the important chords in the key of D (some using only one finger), improvise instrumentals, write songs, and get funky with country blues ideas. Using the folk classic "The Water Is Wide" as an example, Artie reveals how a song can be harmonized using basic chord positions in this tuning.

DADGAD will transform the way you play your guitar. It will help you improvise beautiful fingerstyle pieces with its unique tonality, and inspire you to go on to more advanced studies in alternate tunings.

What's DADGAD? A simple tool that many players utilize to bring new texture and color to the guitar's sound. It's widely used by songwriters, blues guitarists and contemporary fingerstyle players. Three of the strings are retuned to get into DADGAD: The two E strings (6th and 1st) are dropped a whole tone to D, and the B (2nd string) is dropped to A. The remaining strings, A (5th), D (4th) and G (3rd) are not retuned. Thus:

E becomes D; A remains A; D remains D; G remains G; B becomes A; E becomes D

Because there is no 3rd note of the scale, the resulting sound is neither major nor minor, giving it a ringing, open sound that fits a variety of styles, tonalities and genres.