Alternate tunings
I was struck with an odd thought last night as I was running some errands: What if I were to tune my 5-string violin so that it went A D G B E (the same as the top 5 strings on the guitar)? It was an intriguing idea, with a bunch of pros and cons:
Pros:
- I'm already a pretty good guitar player and with my violin tuned this way, there are countless songs that I already know so well that, beyond a few technical issues, they would transfer almost seamlessly.
- The adjacent G & B strings make playing thirds and fourths almost trivial. Those have always been my weak point in the double-stop world.
- I can avoid using my pinky. Pure laziness here, my pinky is my weakest finger and gets tired easily.
- The pentatonic blues scales make a nice box pattern in this tuning and I do a lot of blues type soloing on the guitar. Having the violin in the same tuning would allow me to apply those same blues stylings on the violin without having to relearn the scales.
Cons:
- I am a fluent sight reader on the violin. Not so much on the guitar.
- I'd lose the low C, D, E, F, and G notes.
- I'd lose most of my memorized violin tunes. Or, at least, I'd have to go about relearning them.
- Playing octaves becomes considerably more difficult. I'd have to stretch my pinky a bit extra to reach them when playing in the higher positions.
Do any of you bright folks have any advice for my before I try this? As violin strings don't come cheap, I'm probably not going to do this right away. I'm looking forward to the experiment.
Pros:
- I'm already a pretty good guitar player and with my violin tuned this way, there are countless songs that I already know so well that, beyond a few technical issues, they would transfer almost seamlessly.
- The adjacent G & B strings make playing thirds and fourths almost trivial. Those have always been my weak point in the double-stop world.
- I can avoid using my pinky. Pure laziness here, my pinky is my weakest finger and gets tired easily.
- The pentatonic blues scales make a nice box pattern in this tuning and I do a lot of blues type soloing on the guitar. Having the violin in the same tuning would allow me to apply those same blues stylings on the violin without having to relearn the scales.
Cons:
- I am a fluent sight reader on the violin. Not so much on the guitar.
- I'd lose the low C, D, E, F, and G notes.
- I'd lose most of my memorized violin tunes. Or, at least, I'd have to go about relearning them.
- Playing octaves becomes considerably more difficult. I'd have to stretch my pinky a bit extra to reach them when playing in the higher positions.
Do any of you bright folks have any advice for my before I try this? As violin strings don't come cheap, I'm probably not going to do this right away. I'm looking forward to the experiment.