The Genius Guitar Tuning No One Ever Tries

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]There's loads of popular and cool alternate tunings for guitar. You've got drop D, [music] Dad Gad, [music] F A C G C E. It's not quite as catchy.

[00:00:21][music] Open G.

[00:00:27]There's loads. In some cases, you end up almost having to relearn how the guitar works because the intervals between the strings have all been tuned out of whack.

[00:00:41][music] But this alternate tuning [music] is awesome and it's one of my absolute favorites because in terms of how you play, nothing changes. You can still play all the stuff that you already know, but you'll get some of the coolest sounds and voicings that you'll have never encountered on your guitar [music] before.

[00:01:23]>> [music] >> It's called Gambali tuning invented by legendary fusion virtuoso Frank Gambali.

[00:01:44]But the cool thing is it's not just for fusion music. You don't have to be a Fusion fan. You don't have to go and get an epic mullet to get a lot out of this tuning because even just the most basic chords still sound like really cool.

[00:02:00][music] >> [music] >> Frank Gambali came up with this tuning because he was trying to achieve some of the more complex and interesting chord voicings that he liked to play on piano.

[00:02:27]But due to how these intervals are organized on guitar and standard tuning, most of these chord voicings are impossible to reach on guitar. So the basic idea is that the entire guitar is tuned up a fourth, >> but the top two strings are an octave lower. It's actually very similar to Nashville tuning, which is like an adaptation of a 12 string guitar. So you could kind of visualize it like this, that you've got a capo on the bottom four strings and the top two strings get left open.

[00:03:09]>> [music] >> Interval wise, it's pretty much that, but instead of being on fret 12, because we're a fourth higher, it's like it starts on fret five, and then these top two strings are, of course, tuned lower, which gives more usable chord voicings.

[00:03:26]Now, to get to this tuning, I've got good news and bad news. The bad news is you do need to change your strings.

[00:03:36]AIN'T NOBODY GOT TIME for that.

[00:03:38]>> But the good news is it's actually pretty easy to do.

[00:03:42]>> I'm listening.

[00:03:44]>> And this would be an ideal experiment for a guitar you've had lying around for ages, gathering dust, neglecting for too long. Hey, something like this. Okay, maybe not like this. It at least has to have strings on it. But this one, it's got a tape deck.

[00:04:03]>> [snorts] >> What's your most neglected guitar? Let me know in the comments.

[00:04:08]Okay, so here's the easiest way to do it, right? You're going to take your preferred string gauge of choice. Let's imagine that's a set of 10. It's 10 that Frank Gambal uses. So, you're going to discard the low E string and the high E string. You won't need those. And it's always good to have a spare high E string, is it? So, that's a bonus. So from your set of 10, you're going to take the A string and make that the lowest string. Tune it to A. And then move up the strings. You're going to go A, D, G, and then instead of a B, you're going to tune that to C, but it's still the B string. Does that make sense? And then you need to raid the G and B, the third and second strings from another set of strings, a lighter gauge than you used for the first set. So in this case, that would be a set of nines. So you take the G and B from this set, and you're going to put them as the second and first strings tuned to E A >> sports. It's in the game.

[00:05:16]>> So to recap, from a set of 10, you discard the two E strings. And then you're going to go A D G C.

[00:05:27]And then from a set of nines, your G and B strings you're going to put on as the top two strings tuned to E A. And remember, they're an octave lower. Don't go tightening them super tight because they'll just break. [music] Pretty cool, eh?

[00:05:51][music] It sounds more complicated than it is.

[00:05:57]It's actually pretty straightforward once you get your head around it. Now, because I'm an absolute weakling and I'm not as tough as Frank Gambali, I wanted the start point to be from a set of nines. So, I did the same thing.

[00:06:12]Discarded the two E strings and I used the A, D, G, and B strings. tuned them to A, D, G, C, and then I managed to find a plane 20 and a plane 15 gauge strings and my random spare strings parts drawer. I bet you've got one of them. You got one of those random drawers with capos and stuff on it. Let me know in the comments what's your random parts thing. Anyway, a 20 and a 15 is close enough to what you [music] would get for the G&B strings from a set of eights, but it's not perfect. We'll get to that in a minute. Now, I didn't want to try this tuning on one of my good guitars. So, I ended up picking up this cheap beater Strat copy that my mate was selling for like £30 to Westfield. I think it's actually a Scottish brand. And this basically became proof of concept for me. And I absolutely love this tuning. So now over two years later, I'm ready to graduate moving this on to a better quality guitar. And I also want to tweak the string gauges a little bit because I don't think this is quite as good as it could be. So first up, I'm going to use this Type that was unbelievably just gifted to me when I randomly went into a guitar shop in China. There's a video on that you can check out up there if you like. But this guitar has got huge sentimental value to me and regrettably I barely play it. It's a perfect candidate for this kind of experiment.

[00:07:52]Next up, the strings that I've been using on this current version of Gambali tuning are a bit random. Like there's probably three different brands and types of strings on here. And the string tension with this tuning is always going to feel a bit weird anyway. Feels a bit alien under the fingertips. You need to get used to that. But I'm pretty sure that I can improve it a lot. And I'm going to use the Dario's string tension pro tool that's on their website to try and help me get this a bit better. Okay.

[00:08:31]So, check this out. This is a regular set of 9 to 42 gauge strings. Now you can see here that the D string has actually got higher tension [music] than the low E string. And the B string has got less tension quite a bit than the high E string. And some people use balanced tension strings like these [music] to get around that. I've never tried a balance set before. It makes sense. Have you ever tried a balance set? Let me know in the comments. Now, if you look at the overall total tension of a set of 1942 strings, you can see that is 84.2 lb. And for comparison, a set of 10 to 46 strings has an overall total tension of 102.2 lb. Now, here's the Gambali set that I've been using embarrassingly for probably over 2 years now. And as you can see, the top two strings are higher tension than the bottom two strings. And the third string is considerably lower. So that might be why it felt a bit extra weird. And the total tension is 90.7 lb instead of the 84.2 from a set of nines. So I messed around with the string tension pro tool a little bit more and I think I've come up with the perfect set. Check out how well balanced all these strings are right here. And our total tension is very close to the set of nines at 86.9.

[00:10:04]Now, the plan was to actually order this as a custom string set from Dario, who are actually sponsoring today's video.

[00:10:14]Thank you so much, Dario, for providing the strings.

[00:10:17]But the custom sets take we well to deliver. And I was actually supposed to deliver this video about 6 months ago.

[00:10:27]Sorry, Dario. So, to get things moving a bit quicker, my fault. I'm just going to raid from these three sets of Dario strings. I don't even know if this is going to work better, this tension thing, than what already had. And on top of that, I don't even have an 18 gauge string. That's why I should have ordered a custom set. So, I'm going to have to rob the 17 from this set. And that's going to bring the tension down on the second string a little bit, but it is going to bring the overall total tension closer to a set of nines. We'll be at 85.4 lb. So, maybe that's better, right?

[00:11:10]Let's try it out.

[00:11:12][music] >> [music] [music] [music] [music] >> Okay, so we did it. And I'm so glad that I upgraded this over the previous iteration. It feels so much better. And I mean, part of that is the new strings, the Dario strings. Thank you, Dario. But also the old strings felt like really bad. So this just feels great. So what I've got on here is 324 [music] wound and then all the rest are plain. So, we've got 16, 12, 17, 13.5.

[00:12:09][music] You know what I mean?

[00:12:14][music] [music] [music] Just loads of fun. It'd be really cool to have this on an acoustic. So, a couple of uh things improvements I think I could maybe make to the next iteration of this. A consideration might be the nut slots. They're going to be cut differently from what's going on in here. And I think as long as you're not like picking really hard, you'll be fine. I mainly use this for strumm clean stuff. I suppose you could try and use it for metally shred stuffs.

[00:12:56][music] Even single note playing is a little bit weird because we're going from low to high, back to low again. Here's a minor pentatonic scale. You'll recognize this.

[00:13:14]Check this out. [music] [music] So you can see how that would throw you off a bit. Yeah. [music] Pretty weird. Another thing I didn't consider was the saddles here. I probably should have picked one with six string saddles so I could have dialed in the intonation a little bit better. But I still think it sounds pretty great, [music] even if it's not perfectly intonated.

[00:13:57]So, who is this for? Well, it's obviously for Frank Gambali, but it's for me, too. And I'm far from Frank Gambali, but I think it's also for creative people, maybe writers or producers looking for different sounds and textures, people who are in a creative or playing rut, and people who have a neglected guitar that they can maybe do a showing some love again. But yeah, I absolutely love it. And this Gen two with the more balanced set is pretty cool.

[00:14:39]So, Gambali tuning, have you ever heard of it? Have you ever tried it? Would you give it a go now? Let me know in the comments. And let me know what your favorite alternate tuning is. What would you recommend? And let us know in the comments if you've got any [music] tips or tricks on how to get there.

[00:14:59]Speaking of alternate tunings, if you want to see a video on how I assembled and tuned my baritone parts caster, the jazz bar, then you can check a video out on that up there. It's a pretty old one.

[00:15:15]Anyway, thanks for watching. Until next time, see you later.