In the spring of 1968, at the Maharishi's ashram in Rishikesh in northern India, the Scottish singer Donovan showed John Lennon a finger-picking pattern, and the song in drop D tuning that came out of the lesson, with Lennon's lowest string slackened to D and the open Ds ringing in octaves underneath like a drone, was "Dear Prudence". It came out on the Beatles' double album that November. Nobody called it heavy.
The verdict on everything that followed is simple. The songs in drop D worth learning are the ones that keep hitting the open bottom string, over and over, as the floor every other note is thrown against. Everything else on the long lists is a standard tuned riff played a tone lower.
Every riff that earns its place comes back to that open D the way a pestle comes back down into a stone mortar, driven straight to the bottom, grinding whatever lies there to powder, lifted only far enough to be driven down again, and the more often it lands the finer the grind. A riff that visits the note once is only borrowing it. The good ones will not leave it alone.
How the tuning works string by string, and why it lets one finger hold a power chord, is set out in the chapter it belongs to. What follows are the songs, sorted by what each does with the bottom string, and almost none of them come from the heavy metal bands of the seventies and eighties, who mostly kept to E and to E flat.
The drone, before anyone played it loud
Lennon tuned his guitar down for "Dear Prudence", recorded at Trident Studios in London starting 28 August 1968, and the effect is less a riff than a tambura, the Indian drone instrument he and Harrison had been hearing all spring, the low D sounding under every chord change so that the harmony moves while the floor does not. The song is soft. The method is the whole method.
A year later the idea went electric. Neil Young and Crazy Horse opened Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, released by Reprise in May 1969, with "Cinnamon Girl", played in double drop D, both E strings lowered to D, so that the one-note guitar solo hammers the same pitch in two octaves at once. The cousin is close enough to count. The volume was the new part.
Clamped shut: Helmet and the stop
The New York quartet led by a jazz-trained guitarist who wanted riffs as short and hard as a punch was Helmet, and "Unsung", from Meantime, released by Interscope in June 1992, is the song that made drop D a school. Page Hamilton and the bassist Henry Bogdan both tune down, the bass opens the song alone, and then the whole band hits the open D and stops dead, each phrase clamped off like an artery under a surgeon's forceps, the flow cut mid-pulse and held there while the silence does the damage. Then the clamp comes off.
What Hamilton found was that the dropped string makes the rest as heavy as the note. A band in standard tuning that stops on a chord leaves a hole; a band in drop D that stops on the open bottom string leaves a crater, and "Unsung" is built out of those craters as much as out of the riffs between them. uDiscover Music later called it the foundation the alternative metal of the next decade was built on.
A band in standard tuning that stops on a chord leaves a hole. A band in drop D that stops on the open bottom string leaves a crater.
A half step lower still
Many of the most famous songs filed under drop D are not in drop D at all, but in drop D with every string lowered one more semitone, so that the bottom note is D flat and the guitar reads D flat, A flat, D flat, G flat, B flat, E flat. The shapes are identical. Only the pitch has fallen, and with it the weight.
The reasons are practical before they are aesthetic. Lowering all six strings by a semitone takes a little strain off a singer's top notes, slackens the strings enough to make bends easier for the fretting hand, and loosens the bottom string until it flaps against the frets under a hard pick attack, a rattle that heavier players learned to treat as part of the note rather than a fault in it. The half step costs nothing. It buys a growl.
The Seattle four built around the guitarist Jerry Cantrell and the singer Layne Staley were Alice in Chains, and "Them Bones", the opening track of Dirt, released by Columbia on 29 September 1992, runs in that lower tuning and in a verse of 7/8, the riff lurching forward and snapping back to the open bottom string before the bar has quite finished. It is over in about two and a half minutes. It feels longer.
Twelve years later the same tuning carried a heavier band onto a major label. The Richmond, Virginia five whose guitarists Mark Morton and Willie Adler write almost every riff around the open bottom string were Lamb of God. Released by Epic on 31 August 2004, Ashes of the Wake put "Laid to Rest" at its front, a riff in drop D, built by the guitarists Mark Morton and Willie Adler, that tears the groove out of the open string in short, hammered salvos and throws the chorus in on top of the wreckage.
The song in drop D tuning that won a Grammy
No band has lived in the tuning longer or more stubbornly than Tool, the Los Angeles quartet whose guitarist Adam Jones has built record after record on the open D. "Sober", from Undertow in 1993, walks a slow riff down to the bottom string and leaves it there, and "Forty Six & 2", from Ænima in 1996, spends its whole length circling the same low note with the bass.
"Schism", the first single from Lateralus in 2001, is the summit, beyond dispute. The riff shifts its meter bar after bar, alternating five and seven, what the band itself has called six and a half eight, while the open D stays the one fixed point in the room, and on 27 February 2002 it won the Grammy for Best Metal Performance. Few pieces of music this unsettled have ever sold so well. The open string is the reason it can.
The bassist carries half of it. Justin Chancellor carries the riff high on the bass at the start, and when Jones enters on the open D underneath him the two parts lock like a pair of retractors pulling a wound open, each holding its side while the drums work in the space between them. Few songs in any tuning make the bass the lead voice for so long.
A tuning is a promise about which note will come back. Drop D keeps that promise more brutally than any other, and the best of these songs are simply the ones that keep it most often.
Julien Vasseur, KaosMetal
Where to start
| Song | Artist | Year | Tuning | What the low D does |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dear Prudence | The Beatles | 1968 | Drop D | A drone under the chords |
| Cinnamon Girl | Neil Young and Crazy Horse | 1969 | Double drop D | One note in two octaves |
| Unsung | Helmet | 1992 | Drop D | Hit, then silence |
| Them Bones | Alice in Chains | 1992 | Drop D, half step down | The floor under a limping meter |
| Forty Six & 2 | Tool | 1996 | Drop D | A pedal the bass circles |
| Schism | Tool | 2001 | Drop D | The fixed point while the meter moves |
| Laid to Rest | Lamb of God | 2004 | Drop D, half step down | Hammered in short bursts |
The deeper settings that grew out of these songs, drop C, drop B and the seven string guitar, belong with heavy metal guitar tunings, and every one of them is the same move made further down the neck. None of them can be reached with one peg and ten seconds of turning between two songs.
The heavy metal canon itself mostly stayed away. Few of the records on any list of the greatest heavy metal albums of the seventies and eighties use the tuning for more than a song, which is why the list above leans on the years after 1990, when the bands that came after the canon went looking for a lower floor and found one a single turn of a peg away.
By common consent the sorting takes one listen. Play the riff, count how often the open bottom string comes back, and the list arranges itself: Tool and Helmet at the top, the rest in order behind them. Two semitones, and a floor to land on.
