Nashville tuning (high-strung)

E3 · A3 · D4 · G4 · B3 · E4

Nashville tuning is not a re-tuning so much as a re-stringing: the bottom four strings are replaced with much thinner ones and tuned an octave higher, leaving the top two where they were. The result is a guitar with no low end at all, and it exists almost entirely as a studio device — a Nashville-tuned guitar doubled against a normally-tuned one gives you the shimmer of a twelve-string with the two halves separately controllable.

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Strings

4 strings move from standard

  • 6E3▲12
  • 5A3▲12
  • 4D4▲12
  • 3G4▲12
  • 2B3
  • 1E4

Last few seconds

Harmonics

How far each overtone sits above its ideal position. A stiff, wound string rises to the right.

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What to aim at

Matches what it hears to the nearest string of the tuning.

Getting there from standard

4 of 6 strings move.

  • String 6 E2 → E3 12 semitones up
  • String 5 A2 → A3 12 semitones up
  • String 4 D3 → D4 12 semitones up
  • String 3 G3 → G4 12 semitones up

Songs in Nashville tuning (high-strung)

  • Wild Horses The Rolling Stones
  • Hey You Pink Floyd

What it does to your playing

You play it exactly as you would a normal guitar, with the same chord shapes and the same fingerings, and it sounds completely different — bright, chiming and strangely small. On its own it is thin and slightly odd; layered under an ordinary guitar it is the sound of a great many records where you would have sworn there was a twelve-string. It is also a genuinely useful writing tool, because the missing bass register forces the arrangement to find its weight somewhere else.

Strings and setup

This requires the correct strings and will not work without them. High-strung sets are sold specifically for it; the alternative is to buy a twelve-string set and use the octave strings from it, discarding the rest. Do not attempt to tune ordinary strings up an octave — the fourth string at that pitch will break, and it will break while you are looking at it.

Other tunings

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