I'm a bit late to this thread...
First I must offer a shout-out and giant kudos to fellow UU brother SteveZ, who helped me and answered like a million questions when I first became interested in fifths tunings. His support, encouragement, advice and enthusiasm, all helped me a great deal to overcome any of my (mostly self-inflicted) impediments, and without his support and generosity I never would have discovered and come to really love the sound of, and playing and writing music in fifths tunings -
so MAHALO SteveZ!!!! :rock:
I will have more details to contribute in another, later post, but since I heard about fifths tunings as an option on the ukulele, I've become kind of obsessed with it, and have the following currently:
- a 13" scale Melokia soprano in GDAE with the Aquila 30U set
- a 15" scale Epiphone Les Paul concert in CGDA with the Aquila 31U set
- a 17" scale mango Fluke tenor in re-entrant C4-G4-D4-A4 with Martin M620s
- a 17" scale Kala KA-T tenor in a different re-entrant C4-G3-D4-A4 with D'Addario EJ99T-LG
- a 20" scale Lanikai LU21-B baritone in re-entrant GDAE (octave mando) with Worth Browns (BB) baritone strings
- a 22" scale Oscar Schmidt OGHS steel string acoustic guitar, converted from 6 to 4 strings, linear CGDA, with a custom string set made from D'Addario singles
- a 25" scale noname dreadnaught steel string acoustic guitar, converted from 6 to 4 strings, linear GDAE (mandocello), with single courses from the D'Addario octave mando set
- a 25" scale noname strat-type steel string electric guitar, converted from 6 to 4 strings, linear AEBF, with a custom string set made from D'Addario singles
- an 18" scale Zither-heaven tenor banjo uke, linear CGDA, with a custom string set made from D'Addario STEEL string singles
- an 18" scale Zither-heaven tenor banjo uke, linear CGDA, with a custom string set made from various classical guitar string singles
and I must say now that I have typed this out in this post, HOLY CRAP, I did not realize that I have 10 instruments tuned in fifths, and I have another 10+ ukes in variations of uke tunings, as well as many guitars, basses, etc...
I don't use them to learn other tunes. I downloaded a mandolin (GDAE) and mandola/tenor-guitar (CGDA) chord chart PDF from somewhere, and printed them out, and have been using these instruments to write my own music.
I found the chord fingerings pretty easy (been playing guitar for over 30 yrs) and on some of the scale lengths easier than others. I love the symmetry of this tuning, and am discovering lots of movable chord shapes by ear, and loving this process and would hate to be subject to the dogmatic approach of some 'method books' because the aural discovery is part of the pleasure for me...
Discovery of the fretboard in fifths tunings compared to the modified-fourths we use on guitar and uke, or perfect-fourths used on bass has literally opened up a whole new landscape for me to explore.
I love the wide span of the pitches that compose chords in 5ths tunings, and a lot of my music is an adaptation of sort of a Flamenco meets Chord-Melody with a salting of Campanella and other fingerstyle nuances.
Some of the music I've written in fifths tunings, when played on an ukuele in standard GCEA just sounds congested and cramped due to the closer voicing of the chords, and some ukulele songs I've written sound too wide open when played on fifths-tuned instrument.
I don't solo or do runs or muted chunking at all, and trad. mando players will likely see these tunes as blasphemy because I'm not playing like Chris Thile or Sara Jarosz or Sierra Hull (btw, I love ALL their music).
All of my music here in fifths tunings is instrumental by design, and specifically so as there is NO REASON for me to sing, as the melody is already integrated into what I am playing.
I am NOT a great singer and I get much more satisfaction in letting the instrument speak/sing FOR ME.
There are no recordings yet to share, but at some point I hope to have about 2-3 albums worth of music that I've written available online through the usual platforms (CDBaby, iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, Pandora, etc), but I have to actually record it all first (yes, home studio since 1985 in one form or other).
I've written way more than I though here. I dont have any of the string gauges in memory, but I will have to measure with a digital micrometer and record them, since otherwise I have no way to get replacements if/when a string breaks.
Sorry for my digression and sorry for rambling on so long. I dont even know if I properly answered the topic of this thread and right now feel quite drained, but hopefully this post will offer some insight or inspiration to anyone reading it.
...and thank you for reading all of these words...but now I will depart for a while...