I was mega tempted to get a 7 string, but I ended up getting a 6er with the intention of downtuning it. I doubt I'd really use the whole range, I don't really have much interest playing mega high pitched stuff anyway. That said, I don't understand why guitarists are such purists about things like extra strings, downtuning, tube amps, extended scale necks, etc, guitar isn't some sacred majestic artefact. It's just an instrument. Bassists generally don't give a shit about things like that at all.
It's more like uh. Standard tuning was devised after finding the most logical way to organize the fretboard for most music. Wal Mart isn't the standard store it just sells shit for cheap in bulk because they pay their employees pennies and don't give 'em benefits. GOod strawmn though.
Thats the thing. Theres nothing wrong with wanting to play music that doesnt fall under the category of "most music." just like standard can be logical for most music, there are other tunings that can be more logical for certain voicings and other aspects of playing. You might as well be disagreeing with someone because they happen to not like tomatoes on their burger... Its THEIR burger!
Actually, my Wal Mart analogy is more correct than I first thought. I mean, you can buy basically any type of product you want at Wal Mart. For a lot of basic products, like, say, deodorant, you can get it at Wal Mart easily and cheaply and get a perfectly good product. There are other, more specialized products, like a tuxedo for example, you can buy at Wal Mart, but you won't be able to get one that's very high-quality. If you want a nice tuxedo, you need to go to a formalwear store and get it tailored. Same thing with tunings - you can conceivably play anything in standard tuning, but there are some chords/scales/riffs/patterns that don't work very well in standard and can be done better, more gracefully, and more efficiently in other tunings. There's no reason not to use them. yeah yeah arguing with chronowarp
I don't know of anyone who relearns all their old shit in a new tuning, except for Robert Fripp and Pierre Bensusan, both of whom took an alternate tuning and made it their own standard tuning. The practical purpose of an alternate tuning for most users is as a compositional tool. And if you know your intervals and how to build chords, it's not any harder to compose in CGEbFBbD than it is in EADGBE.
Knowing your intervals doesn't do shit for you when the entire construct by which you understand them on an instrument is thrown out the window. That's like saying if you know how to drive a car if you randomly change every mechanism in it to perform a different action then quickly rattle off what each thing NOW does 3 seconds before you take off in the car and expect it to end well The entire technical struggle of any instrument is the muscle memory and how it relates to shapes and patterns that in turn relate to music relationships that you internalize through your command of the formerly explained-ish. If you wanna play some fucking ass strumming drone vampy faggy time shit then I guess you may have a point, but if you want to have improvisational command in musical scenarios you've been spending your entire life tackling then it's like chopping your feet off and trying to run a marathon.
No, I wanna play this: If a dude has to tune his guitar to AADGBD to play the bass line, chord voicings, and melodies he wants to hear, then I don't see why he shouldn't. If you've got everything you need in standard, then that's good. It's certainly more convenient than retuning all the time. Go through a fuckload of strings doing that.
