Guitar chords (opens in new tab): Popularised by Davey Graham, John Renbourn, Jimmy Page (opens in new tab) and, in more recent years, Newton Faulkner and Ed Sheeran, DADGAD (opens in new tab) 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 (opens in new tab) 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…
D5
D
Gadd9/D
Em11
Asus2
If you want to explore DADGAD further, check out our video tutorial for some more tips…