Since we are traveling to a big Hawaiian jam in Washington in early October, it occurred to me that I might want to play slack-key and other songs too, including with ukulele, and it multiple keys. Normally I would simply bring two guitars to avoid constant re-tuning from taropatch to the old familiar "standard". It occurred to me that I could travel lighter.
So last night I tried playing through a lot of my repertoire using taropatch tuning. It was an interesting exercise to figure out new chord fingerings on the fly for chords that normally don't occur in Hawaiian music (Dm for example). I intend to follow through on this further and work out most of my normal rock & roll, folk, and country songs over the coming weeks. The voicings are different in a neat way - fewer strong bass runs and root notes on the sixth string most of the time, versus what I'm sued to in boom-chuck style playing. Many chords require four strings only to be convenient "grips".
In some ways this is like learning to play all over again -- both good and bad aspects there. It is often useful to shake things up and re-hone the chops.
Ozzie & Kory Tideman (aka thumbstruck) are expert at these "Partial Chords" (Ozzie's terminology) Theoretically, I believe you can finger almost any chord in taropatch tuning using the partial chord concept. If you ever had the privilege of watching Oz "open up" taropatch tuning you would definitely understand why he says it's the most versatile slack key tuning. Check out this Ozzie composition played in taropatch to get an idea of how he opens it up. BTW, this is TP member Robert d'Entremont once known here as "Haole Boy"
Taropatch in non Slack-Key ways
Posted - 08/20/2018 : 09:07:12 AM
