Derek Trucks, who played with Buddy Guy and Bob Dylan before he was a teenager, has enjoyed a storied career. From those early days — when Guy taught him a key lesson about the value of turning down your amp — to his stint with the Allman Brothers Band and beyond, he has been a disciple of open E tuning.
Open tunings have been favored by everyone from Jimmy Page to Tommy Emmanuel. They're extremely versatile, allowing players to escape the restrictions of standard tuning.
Trucks, though, is one of the most prominent names to adopt his preferred open E tuning — E B E G# B E — in which the open strings are tuned to an E major chord. In his recent interview on Chris Shiflett's Shred With Shifty channel, Trucks told the Foo Fighters guitarist — who calls Trucks “the best slide guitar player on earth right now" — why it suits him so well, especially when trading licks with players in more traditional tunings.
Trucks says his early experiences with the tuning saw him “find ways to mimic what you can do in standard tuning.” Then, he says, his horizons were expanded during his time playing in Frog Wings with his uncle, the late Allman Brothers drummer Butch Trucks, and guitarist Jimmy Herring.
“He’s a great guitar player,” Trucks says of Herring, adding, He's a great teacher, too. He was really interested in open E, and he was like, 'We should just get notepads and just write it out.'”
A long, tedious but ultimately liberating exercise followed.
“We would take just different modes, different chords, and write out the neck: ‘Where's this note everywhere on the neck?’ and visualize it. And then you're like, 'Oh shit, there's that chord there.’
“So we have these notebooks from sitting with Jimmy for years, it just kind of opens up a whole world,” he continues. “You put these three notes together anywhere on the neck — it's a version of an E chord. It's just different versions in it. But when you see it, you realize, 'Wow, there's a lot of them.' That opened up that whole world for me. You realize that it's all there.”
Because open E is so close to E standard, Trucks found those patterns were still relevant when playing in his preferred tuning, if only somewhat more difficult .While he has remained loyal to the open tuning for both regular and slide guitar playing, he believes both have their benefits and can work in harmony with each other.
“There's a lot of things that are really easy to do in standard tuning that you just got to get wide fingering in open E," he says. "But the beauty of it is, you end up not falling into the same stuff that most people would. Because what's easy for me is difficult in standard and vice versa. So you just end up playing a little differently.”
He also found it helped him to distinguish his voice as a lead player when sharing the stages with other greats and, in particular, when he’s played in bands with three electric guitar players.
“I noticed that came in handy naturally when I did that tour with Clapton and Doyle [Bramhall II],” Trucks relays. “It was three guitar players in the band, and I'm in open E at all times, Doyle's playing upside down, left-handed, and then Eric is playing in standard.
“So we were kind of never in each other's way, because it was three really different ways. You never fell in the same place; it kind of always spread out in a nice way, just naturally.”
Earlier this year, Trucks reunited with his fellow ABB alumnus Warren Haynes to complete a Greg Allman gem of a song, 20 years after he started writing it.
Haynes spoke to Guitar Player about resurrecting the incomplete track, believing “It just made sense,” that Trucks would play a part.
That followed Trucks' collaboration with Duane Betts on the 2023 single Stare at the Sun, which saw the pairing pay tribute to Betts' late father, Dickey Betts.
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