Exercises and improvising

Have taken some precious guitar time in the last few days, split between diagnostic exercises and improvising.  Tunings have been CCDGAD ("Aerial Boundaries"), BF#DF#C#C# ("Raindigger") and CGDABE. 

The exercises have mostly been centered around 1) the two-finger approach to fingerstyle scale playing, and 2) more work with GAD triads.  Man, do I have a lot of work to do with all this, but I grow more convinced that it's something I want to add to the repertoire and perhaps even specialize in.  There is a real "rightness" and pure visceral pleasure to playing this way, and the options for development seem limitless.

The improvising has been fantastic, if brief.  I would never have guessed how quickly I'd take to improvising in multiple different tunings, but some really cool things have even been coming out of the "Raindigger" guitar.  (Cool to me, of course.  It's absolutely in the "wankery" category and just as well that I develop it much more before subjecting others...)  I'm taking time to see how I can get second, third and fourth harmonics to play off stopped and open notes, and with that tuning in particular, dramatic inserts are almost always available to an open finger.  With the harmonics in particular, it's amazing how many different timbres you can get from "the same note" by using 1) fingernail only upstroke 2) fingernail/fingertip upstroke 3) fingertip upstroke 4) fingernail flick downstroke 5) thumbnail 6) thumbnail/thumb tip 7) thumb tip or 8) finger tap--and any of those can be at various angles.  Fingerstyle gives a lot of options for dynamics as well, that I hadn't anticipated.  Pretty cool!

On the "GAD" tunings, I'm starting to reach a basic comfort with the triads and am starting to diagram the most convenient diatonic sevenths.  I'm still not totally sold on whether it would be best to go with "DGAD" or "CGAD" on those intervals, and it may hinge on whether or not the seventh forms on the GAD strings are usable in themselves, or whether I really need a fourth string.  (e.g., a m7b5 form arguably needs all four tones to distinguish itself;  are there enough such needs that it would outweigh the utility of a four-string group all in 5ths for melody work and for mandolin-like chords?)  What is becoming apparent is that I like some of the features GAD gives me, for improvising.  I find myself making use of that flat-five pivot on the second string, and being able to sound a whole-tone interval in harmonics is really nice in some contexts.

We'll see what comes next.  Right now I'm pretty limited in what I know about the tuning, and yet some really nice stuff manages to sneak out, easily.  As I get the top strings sorted out, I'm looking forward to seeing how to add some independent bass lines, and then also to see how melodic things work when I transfer back and forth between the regular-interval strings and these top ones.

Should be fun!