Hey, Down Up!
We love the Open form tuning you’re talking about. For those not sure on this, you “slack” your 1st string down a note (usually from a linear form), so instead of g c’ e’ a’ for example, you’d have g c’ e’ g’. The same holds true with any other Key you may be tuning to – just drop the first string one step.
It’s true you’ve gone away from a 4th progression, so all your fingerings change, but as downup mentioned, chords are often much easier to play and it’s not only an option for playing any standard sort of chording or picking, but really becomes useful for a wealth of specific styles like Hawaiian Slack Key, Clawhammer, Slide and a lot of beautiful Latin music is written for this form as well.
While you can simply “slack” a 1st string to get a feel for this set-up, on our site we sell slightly heavier gauge 1st strings for all our Linear sets for those who want a full-time set-up with balanced tension on the slacked 1st string. We’ve also got a discussion on the Tips page (#011) full of handy references to tutorials. Finally, on both the Open Strings page and the Tips page, we’ve set up downloads of “The Original Method”, the only work ever published for the Ukulele using the original tuning.
Yes, you’re right on that, this Open form is what the Ukulele started with. In the book, there is a reference to a future songbook with nine popular melodies that the authors, A.A. Santos and Angeline Nunes (yes, from that Nunes family), were planning to write. Alas, it never happened. The key to why they never continued and why the tuning dies may come from another reference in that book:
Anyone who can sing will be satisfied with the strumming, but those who cannot sing and who do not intend playing in an orchestra (as in Ukulele Orchestra) will want to take advantage of this method, and before they realize it will be able to play simple but beautiful “Aloha Oe” (included in the book) to the difficult and famous Stars and Stripes Forever (march).
To me that suggests that Santos & Nunes considered the Open form to be better suited for lead and instrumental playing in general, and the Rajao based Reentrant form to be the choice for strumming, vocal accompaniment and “Ukulele Orchestra” play. One of the examples on our site shows the Machete and Rajao being used precisely this way (Portuguese players), with the Open tuned Machete playing lead and the (double) reentrant Rajao playing rhythm. But Since the Hawaiians have always been great singers and during the first Mainland craze the Ukulele was used for vocal accompaniment as well, there was little demand for a form for lead melody and instrumental playing.
Of course now the pendulum is starting to swing the other way. I would say it’s only a matter of time before this form makes a comeback and becomes a strong alternative to the beautiful Ukulele reentrant form. Keep fooling around with this type of playing, “Down Up”, and you’ll have to change your forum name!