The story
Strum those strings once and let the sound hang in the air. It feels different, doesn’t it? Like the guitar has finally let out a long-held breath. You have just tuned your instrument to Open G—D, G, D, G, B, and D. It is a resonant, ringing landscape where a single sweep of your thumb creates a perfect G major chord. It is a sound that has traveled a long way to get to your fingertips today.
Back in the mid-1800s, this wasn’t known as Open G. It was called Spanish tuning. The name came from a gentle parlor piece called Spanish Fandango, composed by Henry Worrall. It became a household sensation, and for decades, people across the country learned this specific tuning just to play that one melody. It turned the guitar into something almost like a piano, where the instrument did the heavy lifting of the harmony, allowing the player to focus on the feeling.
But the sound didn't stay in the parlor. It traveled down to the Mississippi Delta and changed into something much more haunting. In the hands of legends like Robert Johnson and Son House, the sweetness of that old Spanish Fandango was replaced by the growl of the blues. They would press a glass bottleneck or a heavy metal slide against these strings. Because the tuning is already a chord, the slide allows you to glide between notes with a vocal, crying quality that standard tuning simply cannot mimic.
If the resonance feels familiar in a different way, it might be because Open G is also the natural home of the five-string banjo. In the late 1960s, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones took that banjo influence and did something radical to the electric guitar. He realized that the low sixth string—that deep D you just tuned—actually got in his way when he wanted to drive a rhythm. So, he simply took it off. Playing with only five strings, he used this tuning to craft the iconic, driving riffs of Honky Tonk Women, Brown Sugar, and Start Me Up. It became the definitive, skeletal sound of the Stones from 1968 onwards.
You don’t have to remove a string to feel that power, though. Right now, your guitar is a blank canvas of harmony. To see what I mean, try this one small thing. Take your index finger and lay it completely flat across all the strings at the fifth fret. Give it a strum. That is a C major. Now, slide that same flat finger up to the seventh fret and strum again. That is a D major. Just like that, with one finger and the open strings, you have the three pillars of the blues and rock and roll. Listen to how the notes sustain and bleed into one another, vibrating through the wood and against your chest.