DADGAD tuner: D A D G A D, free, with your mic

This is a free online guitar tuner, already set to DADGAD. The strings become D A D G A D, with a D at the bottom and a D on top. Press Start, play one open string, let the note settle, then aim for 0 cents. Open D, Open G and standard are in the menu above the tuner, so getting there and back is one click. No account, no download. It sits alongside the rest of our free guitar tools.

What DADGAD tuning is

DADGAD is spelled out by its own name: the six strings, from the thickest to the thinnest, are D, A, D, G, A, D. It is sometimes called a modal tuning, and occasionally Celtic tuning, which tells you where most people meet it rather than what it is.

What it is, mechanically, is standard tuning with three strings taken down a whole step and three left alone. Nothing goes up. The result has a D at both ends of the chord, which is the whole character of the thing: strum all six and you get a wide, ringing sound with no obvious key, built on a root you can hear at the top and at the bottom at once.

It is not an open tuning in the sense Open D and Open G are. Those two give you a complete major chord on the open strings. DADGAD gives you three different notes, D, G and A, which is a root, a fourth and a fifth. Musicians write that chord Dsus4, and the suspension is the point: it is a chord waiting to become something, and it never does on its own.

From standard to DADGAD: three strings down

Three strings move, all of them by a whole step, and all of them downwards. The fifth, fourth and third strings do not move at all. If you can already get to Drop D, you are a third of the way there: the sixth string move is the same one.

The order below keeps the pull on the neck as even as it can be while you work, and it ends where the mistakes are easiest to hear.

1. Start in standard tuning. A tuning built on a guitar that was already out of tune is just out of tune somewhere else.
2. Take the sixth string down from E to D. Play it open, mute the others with your palm, and watch the note name change on the way: E, then Eb, then D.
3. Take the second string down from B to A, and the first from E to D. Those two are the ones that make the tuning sound like itself, because they put a D on top of the chord.
4. Check the fifth, fourth and third strings even though you did not touch them. Loosening three strings takes tension off the neck, and the other three drift a little when it relaxes.
5. Strum all six and listen. The chord should ring without any one string beating against the rest. Go round again if it does.

There is an ear check for each step as well, useful when you have no tuner at hand. The open fourth string is a D, one octave above the sixth string you are aiming for. The open fifth string is an A, one octave below the second string you are aiming for. And the first string in DADGAD is two octaves above the sixth. Three octaves, three checks, no counting.

Why DADGAD is neither major nor minor

One note decides whether a chord sounds happy or sad, and it is the third. D major contains F#, D minor contains F, and that single half step is the whole difference. DADGAD contains neither. Count what the open strings give you and there are only three different notes in there: D, G and A.

So the tuning cannot commit. Play a melody over those open strings and the melody decides the mood, note by note, while the chord underneath agrees with all of it. That is why the same shape can sound bright in one bar and bleak in the next, and why so much modal music, where a tune moves through a scale rather than through chord changes, sits so comfortably here.

It has a practical consequence too, and it catches people coming from Open D. A straight barre across all six strings does not give you a major chord. It gives you the same suspended shape moved up the neck: barre the second fret and the notes are E, A and B, barre the fifth and they are G, C and D, barre the seventh and they are A, D and E. Useful chords, all of them, and none of them major.

Chords in DADGAD: one and two fingers

Here is where the tuning earns its reputation. With two Ds already ringing at both ends of the chord, you rarely need more than two fingers to say something, and the strings you leave open do most of the work.

• Nothing held down. D, G and A, the suspended chord the whole tuning is built on. Play it, then let it ring while you hum over it, and you will hear why it is called open.
• One finger, second fret of the third string. The G becomes an A, and now the only notes on the guitar are D and A: a root and a fifth, six strings wide. That is a drone, and almost every DADGAD piece comes back to it.
• Two fingers, and you choose the mood. Keep that first finger where it is and add the fourth fret of the first string: the top D becomes F#, and the chord is D major. Move it to the third fret instead and the top note is F, so the chord is D minor. One fret decides it, which is the third doing its job.
• Partial barre, bottom three strings, second fret. Leave the top three open and the notes are E, G, B, A and D: an E minor chord with a seventh and an eleventh sitting on top of it. Three fingers at most, and a sound no first position chord in standard tuning will give you.
• Fifth fret, sixth and fifth strings only. The rest open, and you get G, D and A. A G with no third in it, which is the same ambiguity as the open chord, moved to another root.

The pattern behind all of that is partial shapes. In standard tuning you press most of the strings most of the time. In DADGAD you hold two or three and let the others ring, because the open strings are already part of the chord. It is the reason fingerstyle players take to the tuning: a melody can move on the strings you are fretting while the drone carries on underneath, and your thumb has somewhere to go.

A capo belongs here too. It raises the whole tuning by as many half steps as the fret you clamp, so every shape you have learned moves with it and the suspension survives intact. At the second fret the open strings become E, A and B; at the fifth they become G, C and D. That is how a DADGAD player changes key without retuning three strings in front of an audience.

DADGAD vs Open D

These two are one string apart, and it is worth seeing exactly how close they are. Open D is D A D F# A D. DADGAD is D A D G A D. Five of the six strings are identical. Only the third string differs, and only by a half step: F# in Open D, G in DADGAD.

That half step is the third of D major. Lower the third string to F# and the open strings become a complete D major chord, so a straight barre anywhere on the neck hands you another major chord with no shape to learn. Leave it at G and the chord has no third at all, so a barre gives you a suspension instead and the mood stays open.

How to choose, in one line each. Take DADGAD when you want a melody to sit on top of a drone and decide the mood itself. Take Open D for slide playing and for big ringing D major accompaniment, where a barre is a chord. Take Open G for blues slide and for the looser feel it has when the sixth string is left out of the way.

If you would rather keep every chord shape you already know and only gain a low D, none of these is the answer: the Drop D tuner moves one string and leaves the other five standard. For standard tuning and the full list of presets, go to the online guitar tuner. And if getting a guitar in tune at all is still new ground, how to tune a guitar is the door to come through first.

Who plays in DADGAD

The fastest way to decide whether a tuning is for you is to hear what other people did with it. These are reference points rather than a playlist: find any of them, listen to the guitar rather than the song, and you will hear the two D strings ringing underneath everything else.

Two of those deserve a sentence of history. Davy Graham is the player who spread DADGAD through the English folk scene of the 1960s, drawing on what he had heard while traveling in Morocco, and most of the fingerstyle vocabulary in the tuning descends from him. Pierre Bensusan went further and made it his only tuning, which is the clearest proof available that DADGAD is a whole instrument rather than a special effect for one piece.