DADGAD

DADGAD drops three strings — the 6th, 2nd, and 1st, each by a whole step — and lands the guitar somewhere genuinely new. The open strings no longer spell a resolved chord OR standard tuning's polite compromise: they spell a suspension, and a suspension commits to nothing. That non-commitment is the entire point, and the reason this has been the lingua franca of Celtic and modal accompaniment since the 1960s.

The retune, string by string

Derived from pitch math against standard EADGBE (deltas in semitones):

Strummed open, the six strings now spell Dsus4 — computed from the retuned pitch classes, not asserted.

Chords in this tuning

The shared DADGAD (Celtic) chord library ships 1080 curated voicings across all twelve roots — browse the full per-chord diagrams in the DADGAD (Celtic) chord library on String Warrior, our comparative sister site (same underlying data, page for page).

Using it

Because the open strings spell Dsus4, almost any fretted fragment rings against a legal drone: melodies on the middle strings float over open bass Ds, and the tuning rewards two-finger chords with open strings doing the rest — modal color rather than major/minor declaration. D mixolydian and D dorian are its home modes; the D mixolydian page shows the standard-tuning geography for comparison.

Working method: learn three or four grips, not a chord dictionary — the library above holds curated voicings when you want them, but DADGAD players build music from small fretted moves plus drone. Retune carefully (three strings moving means the neck settles; sweep twice with the tuner), and expect your standard-tuning shapes to be strangers here: only the 5th, 4th, and 3rd strings kept their pitches, so the standard reference applies to exactly that middle band and nothing else.