DADGAD

Zeppelin also demonstrated that hard rock could be subtle.

Cashmere, 1975, built on a hypnotic repeated guitar figure in an unusual tuning, D-A-D-G-A-D, layered over an orchestral string arrangement, has a grandeur that owes as much to John Paul Jones's arrangement skills as to Page's guitar.

But the guitar's riff is so locked into the song's DNA that it cannot be separated from it.

Beyond Zeppelin, the early 1970s saw hard rock coalesce into a genre with recognizable codes and conventions.

They were slow.

Tony Iommi's guitar riffs on Iron Man, War Pigs, and Black Sabbath moved at a deliberate, crushing pace that felt genuinely threatening in a way that Speed did not.

Aomni had lost the tips of two fingers of his fretting hand in an industrial accident at age 17, and he compensated by detuning his guitar to reduce string tension.

This accident, in the great dark irony of rock history, produced the tuning that defined heavy metal – lower, darker, more menacing than anything that had come before.

You know, all th- those weird things, which is sort of a way of creating an open tuning s- type situation but just with capos.

You know what I'm talking about? Like, like the cutout capo and the, you can turn the capo around and you can do a few things that simulate DADGAD or other things.

But then you can't play that song if you don't have those capos, man.

And so I have certain songs that, like...

But I get what you're saying.

Well, I can write folk music in fucking Dadgad that sounds like Led Zeppelin, that sounds like Roy Harper, and I can put out an album of that.

But that's just me trying to be Led Zeppelin or Roy Harper.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Uh, the song was performed in an alternate tuning.

It was a D-A-D-G-A-D, and, uh, this is funny, uh, regarding, regarding this, Gilmour said in '94, quote, "That was a new tuning for me.

The funny thing is that I didn't know it was such an established tuning.

I thought it was something new that I had invented.

Do the, I'll do the song version

Yeah, and, and I, you know, I play in DADGAD, which is kind of a traditional tuning and, you know, "Where will they go when there's no more room in Arlington?" And then, uh, I, I sketched it out as the history of the cemetery.

You know, we took it away from Robert E. Lee, the land, and started burying soldiers there to punish him, and, and then I showed the lyrics to Pete Seeger, who was a neighbor, you know, and friend, and, and, uh, it solidified and, and that was on my first album in 2013.

But so there, you know, that's like something in me needed to kind of share that question, and it ended up sort of part... [laughs] It ended up in the song category because, partially 'cause the journalist had already done the story.

Mm-hmm.

And the DADGAD Suite, DADGAD is a, a guitar tuning, right? Instead of EADGBE, you use DADGAD.

Oh, right.

It's, it's a s- special type of tuning.

Yeah.

So in, in 2005, I went over to France to, um, to study with a, a French guitar player called Pierre Bensusan.

And so he, he plays mostly in DADGAD.

Mm-hmm.

But I feel like I'm just, like, constantly stealing, like, your guys' tunings.

Like DADGAD, shout out to that.

Mm.

I wrote a song in that a couple days ago, and I stole it from Casey, so.