Most open tunings hand you a major chord when you strum all six strings open. Open G minor does something moodier: tune to D, G, D, G, Bb, and D, and you get a full minor chord instead — which makes this one of my favorite tunings for anything that needs to feel a little unresolved or emotional. It’s a natural fit for slide guitar, and shows up constantly in blues, rock, and folk.
- 6th string: D
- 5th string: G
- 4th string: D
- 3rd string: G
- 2nd string: Bb
- 1st string: D
Open tunings in general go back to Delta blues, where slide players used them constantly to get full chords ringing under a bottleneck. Open G minor is a moodier branch of that same family — Keith Richards is the name most associated with it, using it to craft some of the Rolling Stones’ most recognizable riffs, but the appeal is the same one blues players found decades earlier: it does a lot of emotional work with very little effort.
I keep coming back to it when a song needs to feel cinematic without a lot of overthinking on my part — the chord shapes do most of the work themselves. It’s worth exploring whether you’re just starting out or you’ve been playing for years; there’s always another riff hiding in it.