Estimated reading time 6 minutes
Table of Contents
Introduction
Want the authentic sound that comes with Hawaiian tuning? How you tune impacts the guitar’s sound. Read more to learn how to tune your guitar like a Hawaiian.
Open tunings make chords, but not all alternate tunings have to be limited to open tunings .
- Hawaiian guitarists have created a vast array of alternate tunings.
- Today, we will look at Taro Patch and F Whine.
This article uses technical musical terms. For definitions, see the Glossary at the end of the post.
Tune Your Guitar Like a Hawaiian: The History of the Slack-Key Guitar
Mobile users: for best results reading the music, tilt your screen 90o to the right.
Before you can tune the guitar like a Hawaiian, you have to understand how the guitar got introduced to Hawaii.
Amy Ku’uleialoha Stillman gives a brief history of the slack-key guitar:
- “The introduction of the guitar to Hawai’i is credited to Mexican cowboys, brought over in the 1830’s to manage cattle. Among Hawaiians who eventually assumed the skills and responsibilities of ranching, the guitar remained popular in times of leisure.
- “The slack-key method developed largely in rural, and specifically ranching, contexts, and emerged in commercial recordings in the 1940’s” (“Musical Instruments” 389).
Keola Beamer and Mark Nelson further explain the history of slack-key guitar:
- “For most people it is difficult to learn to play an instrument merely by watching it being played. Since the paniolo had only a brief exposure to the Spanish guitar the Hawaiians were in a position of having to invent a way of playing it almost on their own.
- “The first problem that surfaced was how to tune the instrument. A logical first step would be to tune the six strings in relation to each other so that they made a pleasant sound when struck together. As it turns out, this can be achieved by loosening or slacking some of the strings.
- “One example would be to tune down from the standard EADGBE tuning to achieve a DADF#AD or a D major chord. Hence the phrase ‘slack key’ and the Hawaiian language equivalent, Ki (key) Ho’alu (to slacken, slack)” (Beamer and Nelson 9 – 10).
The tab example above shows the harmonics you use to get into open D.
- (Click here to learn how to get into open D without using frets.)
- The video below has Keola Beamer giving a general demonstration of playing harmonics.
Keola Beamer Shows How to Play Harmonics Video
Tune Your Guitar Like a Hawaiian: Ray Kane’s Open G
Ray Kane gives us our first model of how to tune the guitar like a Hawaiian. Kane tunes using a method similar to Stefon Grossman and Keith Richards.
- At one point in the guitar instruction video, Ho’alu: Play & Learn, Kane tunes open G.
- Much like Richards and Grossman, Kane strums the open strings while turning the pegs with his left hand.
- He focuses on adjacent strings as he progresses across the neck from lowest string to highest.
- Similar to Belfour, Kane’s opening G would have the best sound on one or two chords.
- This may explain why some Hawaiian slack-key guitar songs seem to favor major keys with just two chords: tonic and dominant.
- The video below shows an excerpt from Ho’alu: Play & Learn, but YouTube, sadly, no longer has the sections where it shows him getting into open G.
Ray Kane Teaches Slack Key Guitar Video
Tune Your Guitar Like a Hawaiian: Keola Beamer
Alternate vs Standard Tuning
Next, we turn to Keola Beamer for our second example of how to tune the guitar like a Hawaiian.
- He says, “My guitars never get tuned to ‘normal;’ [normal (EADGBE)] don’t sound good, you know?
- “Because modal tunings are all they’ve worked in for twenty six years. They know how to vibrate. How to work. But you change them to ‘normal’ tuning and they can’t do it” (Beamer and Nelson 70).
Notice how he likes the extra resonance (“They know how to vibrate…”) that the modal guitar intonation gets.
- The extra resonance happens when the guitar stays outside of equal temperament.
- “This is the heart of the Hawaiian slack key guitar. The beautiful overtones and coloration of sound create a radiant space in the air around you” (Beamer and Nelson 127).
- In other words, using Kane’s method, the tone color gets enhanced when in open G, open D, F Wahine, etc. This in turn creates the sound of ki ho’alu.
Taro Patch (Open G)
Hawaiian slack-key guitarists call open G “Taro Patch.”
- Hawaiians grow Taro root tubers as a food crop.
- Thus, taro patch has been named after a field of vegetables.
I pulled the taro patch cent values shown on the chart below off of a tuning track on the CD that came with Keola Beamer’s method book:
- Keola Beamer Teaches Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar
- (Click here for a description of cents.)
Notice that the major third between strings 2 and 3 is small, but not so small as to make different chord voicings unusable.
- This makes the G chord have better sounding intonation, and it also effects the guitar’s tone color.
- Getting into open G without using frets, as Kane does, yields similar results to Beamer’s open G.
- This is the cornerstone for tuning the guitar like a Hawaiian.
- Beamer’s version of taro patch has similar cent values in common with Rory Block‘s open G.
- Namely, both have small major thirds.
- Nonetheless, comparing them side-by-side also shows that the cent values for open G can vary a lot from player to player.
F Wahine
Our third example for tuning the guitar like a Hawaiian also comes from Keola Beamer.
- I pulled the cent values in the chart above off of a tuning track on the CD that came with Beamer and Nelson’s method book Learn to Play Hawaiian Slack-Key Guitar.
- F Wahine (CFCGCE) does not make a triadic chord.
Beamer shows how to check F Wahine in his instruction video The Art of Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar.
- He directs the listener to play the harmonics at the 12th fret all together to “make sure everything sounds nice.”
- As another check, Beamer plays the strings from the open 5th to 2nd string with string 1 depressed at the 1st fret.
- The video below shows Beamer playing Ku’u Lei Wawpuhi Melemele (from the The Art of Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar), which he plays in F Wahine.
- Also, at 1:15 in the video, you can see him tweak his 6th string guitar peg on the fly. No frets used at all!
- The frets force the guitar into equal temperament.
- However, Beamer’s ear can adjust things to get a better sound so that the notes fall outside of equal temperament.
Keola Beamer Plays in F Wahine Video
Concluding Thoughts to Tune Your Guitar Like a Hawaiian
Beamer states:
That is what the Hawaiian slack key guitar is… that beautiful open sound. There’s no sound really quite like it in the guitar world that I know of.
You get a great modal tuning thing going and the melody notes have a sort of halo around them because of the sympathetic vibration (Beamer and Nelson 70).
Again, the guitar’s tone color plays a central role in the sound of Hawaiian guitar music.
- However, it also affects the tone color of the melody notes in the other instruments in the song.
- Hence Beamer’s comment about the “halo around them.”
When you tune your guitar like a Hawaiian, you can achieve the sound of Hawaiian slack-key guitar.
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© 2022 Geoffrey Keith
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