Our second song in the key of D is called big road blues by Tommy Johnson. play a little bit of it for you, and then we'll talk about the chords and the tuning. I'm not sure if you noticed or not but there's something a little different about Tommy Johnson's big road blues compared to stack elite and The difference is the tuning. And for the first time in this lesson series, we're going to take a look at one of the alternate tunings that was commonly used in acoustic blues in the 1920s and 30s and beyond. And it's called drop D tuning. And this is something that we're going to use on our next four tunes that we're going to learn.

And in the key of D, to be able to play an alternating bass and do some other things. You've got to change your tuning a little bit. And what we're going to do is take our standard tuning, so we're in D, and we're going to take our sixth string, and we're going to tune it to a D string. So what we're doing is tuning our six string the same as our fourth string to these were Dropping the low E string to a D, hence the name dropped detuning. Want to get it just right, especially for this bass run that we're going to use and in big red blues. So with that tuning, we've now got everything tuned the same as we always have standard tuning except our low E is now a D. And that lets us do this.

Play an alternating bass between the sixth and the fourth, which we couldn't do if we weren't in standard tuning. And stagger Li when we played over the D chord or alternate bass was between the alternative basis between the five and the four. So now let's take a look at the chords and big road blues. We've also got to make a couple adjustments here. Our D chord is going to stay the same so no differences. Their D major.

Now when we go to play a G, since we just change the tuning on our sixth string, we can't play our G the way we used to. So what we're gonna do is mix it up a little bit and then drop D tuning. We're going to play our G seventh chord like this, and what I'm doing is taking my second finger, putting it on the second fret of the fifth string. And then my pinky is going to go on the third fret of the second string. And we've got that chord which is not quite the same as our regular G, but this is gonna substitute is our G and drop D tinny, and then our alternating bass. When we need it, we don't need it for big row blues.

We're going to have a five four we can also play the monotonic bass on the on the fifth string. Going back to the drop D tuning and the D chord. We can play the monotonic bass Now on the open six, because it's 10 to a D, just like when we play in standard 10 in the key of E, we can thump that open sixth string in E. So anyway, that's two of our chords, you may need to work on this one a little bit. And in fact, big road blues and our next song Can't he believes we're both really good for learning, helping you learn that chord to practice it. And then again, India, we've just got three chords and all of these songs are a seventh and we're going to be using a monotonic bass the open fifth string. So our chords D with the open sixth string, we've got our new g seventh chord.

And we're going to be playing the fifth string bass and then we've got our five which is our a seven. With the open fifth string, we'll be muting that with that right hand palm and thumping that as we go through the Tim So now let's take a look at big road blues and how Tommy Johnson played it.