The Darkness’ Justin Hawkins has offered some choice words for alternate tunings, revealing he isn’t convinced by anything other than the orthodox E standard approach.
Talking tone, techniques, and tunings with Guitar World, he says you’ll never find him stepping away from standard tuning, as he believes it provides everything a musician should ever need when it comes to expressing their ideas.
Throughout his career, Hawkins has experimented with different styles of music, from the Thin Lizzy-loving classic rock The Darkness was founded upon to recent dabblings with country (Cold Hearted Woman) and cinematic folk (Weekend in Rome). But when asked if he’s also experimented with tunings, he offers a pointed response.
“Oh, no. I like a standard-tuning guitar. There’s not a semitone down across the board,” he quips. “If you can’t put your ideas across with that, you're in trouble anyway, I think.”
For bands like Sonic Youth, atypical tunings have been their bread and butter since their very early days, after a run-in with some bizarrely tuned instruments helped Thurston Moore discover his true identity as a player.
“I never saw myself as much of a guitarist in standard tuning,” Moore once said. “I didn’t feel like I needed to express myself in that tuning and never felt comfortable in standard.”
Meanwhile, percussive acoustic guitar players like Jon Gomm and Marcin utilize open tunings to empower their very specific and very entertaining playing styles, while Soccer Mommy believes pushing the boundaries of tunings can take her creativity to new heights.
“You can get a little bit formulaic sometimes when you know where to go next,” she explains, “alternate tunings definitely take that away.”
Hawkins’ comments, then, may prove to be somewhat divisive.
Elsewhere in his new GW interview, Hawkins discusses his go-to scales for guitar solos, detailing why stepping away from pentatonic boxes can elevate his playing.
“There are a lot of moments when it’s pentatonic, but I go for harmonic minor stuff as well,” he reveals. “I like a ninth in a solo because I think it forces you to decide whether you're going to go up or down from there. You can’t just have it suspended in no man’s land. You have to make a choice.
“Pentatonic is a go-to thing when you’re building a solo,” Hawkins develops. “But I tend to think of a solo as a collection of phrases that you’ve bastardized and made your own. And I’ve got a couple licks that I don’t think anyone else does that sounds like a spider crawling across the fretboard.”
Unfortunately, Hawkins doesn’t mention a specific song in which his arachnid leads can be found lurking, but he did add that his standard tuning experiments have been taking him to new places in recent years.
“During the pandemic, I taught myself how to play slide guitar with traditional tuning,” he says in a move that might make others wince. “And I added that to this album as well, just to express myself in a different way.”
To read the full interview with Justin Hawkins, visit Magazines Direct to pick up the latest issue of Guitar World.
