Standard Tuning in Schizophrenia?!
 

According to the mustang guitar tab, it isn't standard, but on gearography it lists one of Lee's stingray's as EADGBE. http://www.sonicyouth.com/mustang/eq/gear.html

2001 -- EADGBE (Schizophrenia, Teenage Riot, Tom Violence - JIM)
2002 -- EADGBE (Schizophrenia)

Does that happen a lot?

i'd guess it was played by jim on shizo too.

standard tuning. the cheap sellout bastards.. my illusions have ben shattered.....

sorry, non guitar literate muso piss taking reply!

Jim played in standard sometimes.

I don't think that's accurate. Lee's tuning for Schizophrenia is DDDDAA.

Edit: Actually, after looking at the page, it lists that Lee used it in DDDDAA until Jim took it for the following years in EADGBE. The way it's notated is just a little confusing.

Why does/did Jim play in standard?

It's just the way he does it. There's no set part for a third guitar in Schizophrenia, so he just played to accentuate Thurston and Lee's parts in EADGBE. Thurston and Lee know their tunings well as they invented them. Jim, like most people, learned to play guitar in standard.

so does that mean we lose indie cred for liking sonic youth?

man, i know i should've gotten into interpol instead.

But, lets be honest there are so many ways to play the same song on guitar. SO MANY. i can think of a dozen for 'Iron Man'

correct! later on (murray street and beyond) jim started adopting SY's tunings and i don't think he used standard anymore... ie: 2002 tour he was using that firebird in GDD# (retuning it to F# for tom v/white x) and sometimes using a capo to change the key for certain songs (A for silver rocket/candle). and yes, i took all that info directly from my site.

just going by the yearly gear tables on my site for 03/04/05 it looks like he went from using the firebird for schizo (2003) to using lee's old white jazzblaster, possibly in DDA (lee's tuning for schizo) in 2004, then to an SG in GDD# for 2005, so it seems like jim bounced around a lot between how he played his parts on certain tunes. unless, of course, that cream jazzblaster was in GDD#. then he just bounced around guitars.

but uuuuh point being, jim made standard tuning cool. hence why half of rather ripped is in standard!

I'm very adamant on using standard tuning these days/at the moment. I find it more challenging and rewarding - I'm very much into sticking with the rock basics right now. I find it too... easy, maybe the word, less satisfying to tune to an uncommon tuning and write. That's how I feel right now anyway. Which is different than I thought a few years or even a year ago when I was always experimenting with different tunings.

i agree with it definitely being a challenge going from an alternate tuning back to standard.

i still don't like playing in standard too often, though.

there are tons of different ways, but each way holds its own nuance in-terms of sound and timbre and stuff.

I can't play in standard at all.

I made up my own tuning a couple of years ago, and I've just gone about mastering that.

Yeah, I wrote a lot of songs in different tuning, but it's so hard to solo in them, as the scales are all out of whack, which also makes it harder to jam. Also, teaching band members your tunings and all the parts to it can be confusing.

Well, my tuning, GBDGDG, which I think Joni Mitchell had a variation of, fits in pretty well with standard tuning when played as a group. If it was as radical as DDDDAA it wouldn't, but yeah.