Favourite Guitar tunings

New favourites of mine:

D A D F# B E

Nice for playing acoustic fingerpicking stuff with bar chords and slides, writing a ton of stuff in this right now.

Another favourite:

Not so much a tuning, but a capo on the 4th fret (from the bottom of neck up) so it frets every string except the low E, and then tune (what would normally be) the B string up half a step.  

Obviously you can tune every string up 2 steps and the B up 2.5 steps but it's a lot easier with the capo, + the smaller frets at that distance make fretting chords a lot easier.

Although if you were so inclined to tune up, you can tune it as:

E C# F# B E G#

If you have light enough string gauges/are game to play with that ridiculous string tension.

Edited by progkidjoel - October 18 2011 at 06:15

Drop D (DADGBE) exclusively for the past 20 years after using it to play along with Helmet (although I first used it to play a 16th Century lute piece when I had classical guitar lessons as a teenager).

 I like open g minor for some of the really nice celtic pieces. Alot of Pentangle/John Renbourn/ Bert Jansch uses this tuning.

Open Hexatonal: EA#DF#CE

Once i played this tuning with bottleneck in a jam, with a flute. Never had so much fun.

DGCGCD

DADGAD

Most of the time though I'm just in standard, but alternate tunings are a great way to experiment with different textures and tones.

E.

I cut off the other strings.

I found a couple more I've used in some notes for songs I had written down a long time ago.  FGDGBE is pretty good, and DADEAE is very silly but can work well.

I tune my fretless to BEADGC  so it's all fourths.  It makes so much more sense than ruining everything with the random major third interval for just one string.  Yeah it makes it more difficult to play generic music with open chords, but it's better for everything else.  Sometimes I take it up to E and do the same, so EADGCF

DDDDDD

Going from lowest string to highest:

C Bb D# C# G# C# (no idea what this tuning is called, used a ton in Sun Kil Moon's stuff. Great for fingerpicking)

D A D G B F# (had to use the F# to play one song, sounds good with the drop D too)

D standard is always nice too, even if it's fairly basic.