Open Tunings and Slide

Two things recur in every IGS class description regardless of who was teaching: open tunings, and what the right hand is doing. This page draws together the technical ground the week covered, as the class descriptions and workshop lists set it out.

Tunings as a way of thinking

The seminar's position on tunings was unusually clear, and it was not the common one. Most players meet open tunings as a set of alternative pitches — retune, learn some shapes, get a sound. Both principal teachers argued the opposite: that a tuning is a way of thinking about the instrument, and that it teaches technique.

Martin Simpson's class put it in terms of the relationship between the banjo and the guitar: tunings inform playing styles, and different tunings hand the left hand a different map. His classes covered what he called tuning-mapping and economy of motion — the idea that a tuning is only useful once you have stopped translating from standard in your head. Bob Brozman approached the same territory from the other side, promising to "expose the hidden structure which underlies all open tunings" rather than teaching them one at a time.

The main tunings in play

• Open G — the default for a great deal of Delta and bottleneck playing, and the tuning most used in the "Rhythm in Your Riffs" material.
• Open D and open E — the other bottleneck standards, giving the darker, more vocal slide sound.
• Open E minor — the Skip James tuning, a standing subject on the requested-workshop list, and the clearest demonstration that a tuning can generate an entire musical personality.
• Standard tuning — deliberately not treated as the beginner's option. A whole strand of the Delta material addressed what can be done in standard tuning, using Robert Johnson as the case study.
• Hawaiian and slack-key tunings — slack-key and lap-style tunings entered the syllabus through Bob Brozman's research into where the resonator guitar travelled, and they were taught as part of the same tradition as bottleneck blues rather than as an exotic aside.

Bottleneck and lap slide

Slide playing ran through the whole week — it was in the seminar's original name, the Acoustic Blues and Slide Workshop. Students working on it were told simply to bring a bottleneck. The classes distinguished between bottleneck playing, with the guitar held conventionally and the slide on one finger of the fretting hand, and lap style, in which the instrument lies face up and the slide is a bar. Brozman worked in both, and the workshop session titled "Slide Guitar Secrets and Rhythm Power" set slide technique and rhythm side by side rather than treating them as separate subjects.

The practical questions that always followed — action height, string gauge, what a slide is made of and how much it weighs, damping behind the slide so the instrument does not ring into mush — were the substance of those sessions. A guitar set up for fretting will fight a slide, and a guitar set up for slide is uncomfortable to fret; most students arrived without having thought about the trade-off.

The right hand

If there is one idea the seminar pushed harder than any other, it is that tone lives in both hands. Brozman's "Deep, Dark Delta Blues Roots" made it explicit: the heavy feeling of the blues "is generated through tone production in both hands." Most students arrive believing tone is a left-hand and equipment matter, and the classes spent real time dismantling that.

Woody Mann's material approached the right hand through syncopation — keeping a thumb line swinging while the fingers pull a melody out above it, which is the technical core of ragtime-derived playing. Simpson's approach came via the banjo: frailing, Carter-style picking, and four-finger picking patterns that most guitarists never encounter. Between them the week covered alternating-bass fingerpicking, percussive attack, and the small physical adjustments that separate a groove from a sequence of correct notes.

The instruments

The steel-bodied resonator sits at the centre of this repertoire for a historical reason: it was built to be loud in an era before amplification, so that guitarists could be heard alongside horns, in music halls, or on a street corner. National instruments of that lineage were the seminar's emblematic guitar, and Bob Brozman was widely regarded as their leading exponent. But no instrument was required. The week covered flat-tops, archtops, resonators and lap instruments, because the styles it taught were made on all of them. The sponsors page records the makers who supported the seminar.

Toolbox

Because the main classes were organised by subject rather than skill level, the optional Toolbox sessions carried the fundamentals: right-hand independence, basic alternating bass, damping, timing, and how to practise. Their existence is the reason a genuine beginner could sit in an open-tunings class without drowning. The full structure is on the programme page, and the class descriptions themselves are on the classes page.