DADGAD guitar tuning for beginners: Try these 5 chords to start with

Tuition
By published

A great tuning for acoustic or electric guitar

DADGAD
(Image credit: Future)

Popularised by Davey Graham, John Renbourn, Jimmy Page, Pierre Bensusan and, in more recent years, Newton Faulkner and Ed Sheeran, DADGAD is a great tuning for acoustic guitar. These chords should give you a good start at figuring out how the tuning works. Simply tune your guitar as pictured above to start – it's really useful to have a headstock tuner handy to help with this. 

You’ll be changing your standard tuned guitar’s strings (E, A, D, G, B and E notes from the lowest note to the highest) to D, A, D, G, A and D.

Though fully fretted chords are possible and well worth exploring, it is ringing open shapes like these that give the most distinctive sound… 

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D5

Chord

(Image credit: Future)

D

Chord

(Image credit: Future)

Gadd9/D

Chord

(Image credit: Future)

Em11

Chord

(Image credit: Future)

Asus2

chord

(Image credit: Future)

If you want to explore DADGAD further, check out our video tutorial for some more tips…

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