HISTORY OF THE TENOR GUITAR

Although most people have never heard of the tenor guitar, it has a long and storied history. According to tenorguitar.com, the tenor guitar "is a fretted four stringed instrument, most commonly shaped like a guitar, sometimes smaller than a normal guitar, which usually has a scale length of 23 inches and which is tuned in "fifths" to CGDA. It has been around for 100 years or more, built by some of the most famous companies and played by several well-known musicians in a wide variety of musical styles."


EVOLUTION OF MY TUNINGS

I learned from my dad on his old Gibson flattop acoustic, which was tuned in the traditional CGDA - the same as a viola. I also played a little 5-string banjo and the four main strings of it were tuned to CGBD. It seemed more conducive to the rock and folk that I was playing at the time, so I also tuned my tenor to that scheme. When I was about 18, I was fooling around and put a thick E string (6th string...the lowest one) on the 4th string of my tenor and created an octave (D, octave D,F#,A) which created an open D major chord and used this as my predominant tuning (I call it drop major triad tuning).  Within a year, I did the same thing to the traditional tuning (I call this drop fifths tuning) and have been writing, recording and performing across all four tuning schemes since then.