We're excited today to welcome our good friend Tommy Emmanuel back to Reverb today, who took the time to teach us a lesson and play us a song.
"I want to go over this tuning that I stole from Chet Atkins," he tells us, cheekily, going on to explain that when he and Atkins were recording their album, The Day Finger Pickers Took Over the World, Atkins played his nylon string in this beautiful G6 tuning for one of the tracks. Emmanuel tuned his own guitar to Atkins' and worked out his own part around it.
The tuning takes the E and A strings down a whole step to D and G, respectively, leaving the other strings in standard tuning. The final result is D G D G B E, with the five bottom strings making a G6. After learning this tuning, Tommy immediately set out to write a few songs that utilized it. He treated us to one of them, "Antonella's Birthday," in the video above. Be sure to check it out, and let us know what you think in the comments below.