{"id":118682,"date":"2023-04-14T09:27:00","date_gmt":"2023-04-14T16:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/acousticguitar.com\/?p=118682"},"modified":"2023-06-05T15:26:55","modified_gmt":"2023-06-05T22:26:55","slug":"the-guitar-tuning-odyssey-of-joni-mitchell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/acousticguitar.com\/the-guitar-tuning-odyssey-of-joni-mitchell\/","title":{"rendered":"The Guitar-Tuning Odyssey of Joni Mitchell"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Joni<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

At the heart of the music of Joni Mitchell is a constant sense of surprise and discovery. The melodies and harmonies rarely unfold in ways that our ears, tamed by pop-music conventions, have come to expect. Her guitar doesn\u2019t really sound like a guitar: The treble strings become a cool-jazz horn section; the bass snaps out syncopations like a snare drum; the notes ring out in clusters that simply don\u2019t come out of a normal six-string. And her voice adds another layer of invention, extending the harmonic implications of the chords and coloring the melody with plainspoken commentary as well as charged poetic imagery. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even though all these qualities have made Mitchell one of the most revered songwriters of our time, an inspiration for several generations of musicians, the creative processes and impulses behind her music have always been clouded in mystery. A guitarist haunted by Mitchell\u2019s playing on an album like Court and Spark<\/a><\/em> or Hejira<\/a><\/em>, for instance, can\u2019t find much help in the music store in exploring that sound; what she plays, from the way she tunes her strings to the way she strokes them with her right hand, is utterly off the chart of how most of us approach the guitar. The only published documentation of her 30-year guitar odyssey is four single-album songbooks transcribed by Joel Bernstein, her longtime guitar tech and musical\/photographic archivist, which show the real tunings and chord shapes. But that\u2019s a very small slice of a career that spans 17 albums, each one a departure\u2014often a radical one\u2014from what came before. Remarkably, Mitchell herself relies on Bernstein\u2019s encyclopedic knowledge of her work\u2014because she has forged ahead with new tunings throughout her career and rarely plays her past repertoire, Bernstein has at several junctures helped her relearn some of her older songs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the wake of her 1996 Grammy for Best Pop Album for Turbulent Indigo<\/a><\/em>, which marked the stunning return of her acoustic guitar to center stage, Joni Mitchell met with me in Los Angeles to offer a rare, in-depth view into her craft as a guitarist and composer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a certain kind of restlessness that not many artists are cursed or blessed with, depending on how you look at it,\u201d Mitchell said. \u201cCraving change, craving growth, seeing always room for improvement in your work.\u201d In that statement lies the key to her music: seeing it as an ongoing process of invention, rather than a series of discrete and final statements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Joni Mitchell began playing the guitar like countless young musicians of the \u201960s, but she quickly turned onto a less-traveled path. \u201cWhen I was learning to play guitar, I got Pete Seeger\u2019s The Folksinger’s Guitar Guide<\/a><\/em>\u201d she recalled. \u201cI went straight to the Cotten picking. Your thumb went from [imitates alternating-bass sound<\/em>] the sixth string, fifth string, sixth string, fifth string… I couldn\u2019t do that, so I ended up playing mostly the sixth string, but banging it into the fifth string. So Elizabeth Cotten<\/a> definitely is an influence; it\u2019s me not being able to play like her. If I could have I would have, but it\u2019s a good thing I couldn\u2019t, because it came out original.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Joni<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

At the same time that she departed from standard folk fingerpicking, Mitchell departed from standard tuning as well (only two of her songs\u2014\u201cTin Angel\u201d and \u201cUrge for Going\u201d\u2014are in standard tuning). \u201cIn the beginning, I built the repertoire of the open major tunings that the old blues guys came up with,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was only three or four. The simplest one is D modal [D A D G B D]; Neil Young uses that a lot. And then open G [D G D G B D], with the fifth string removed, which is all Keith Richards plays in. And open D [D A D F# A D]. Then going between them I started to get more \u2018modern\u2019 chords, for lack of a better word.\u201d As she began to write songs in the mid-\u201960s, these tunings became inextricably tied to her composing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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