The Complete Tuning Guides: nine tunings in one download

Every altered tuning asks the same questions. How do I get there without hurting the guitar? Where are the chords? What is this tuning actually good at, and what isn't it? These nine guides answer those questions the same way for each tuning. Once you can read one, you can read them all.

The set covers Open E, Open D, Open G and Open C for slide and fingerstyle, and Dobro tuning for lap-style resonator. DADGAD and Drop D are for drones, riffs and anything in D. All Fourths and New Standard Tuning are for players who want to rethink the neck altogether.

Each guide is 16 pages. It covers getting into the tuning and what it costs your strings and neck, the neck laid out as a lookup table, and the section that matters most for that tuning. For the open tunings that's working the bar. For DADGAD it's keys and drones, for Fourths it's one shape on every string set, and for Dobro it's chords under a straight bar. Then come the playable shapes, full-neck chord and scale maps marked in intervals so they work in any key, three phrases in tab, and blank diagrams.

The guides also tell you what each tuning is bad at. Most tuning guides skip that, and it's the part that saves you from retuning for the wrong job.

Nine printable PDFs, 144 pages in total, US Letter.