Ostrich tuning
A cursory look at the drone-zone tuning of yore
The Ostrich guitar tuning is named for its first use on “The Ostrich” by Lou Reed and the Primitives.
In Ostrich tuning, all strings are tuned to the same pitch class—say, E or D—though necessarily distributed across two or three octaves, from the low strings to the high strings. When we strum all strings open, we get one big note.
The result is an intensely chorused drone effect on a single pitch class. We can easily bar all strings with one finger to play a different big note.
Though we can open-strum to our hearts’ content, it’s not accurate to call Ostrich an open tuning. It does not offer a chord (like, say, D major) when strummed open—it’s just one big note.
The Ostrich tuning gives us some interesting options, while taking some more familiar ones off the table. We can approach the guitar as a textural element, rather than a harmonic one; much as we might like to, we won’t be playing cowboy chords in Ostrich tuning!
We can use an open drone on the lower strings as a pedal tone. We can play melodies on the higher strings, against our drone, for an effect often likened to sitar music. We can also invert this approach, playing bass lines on the lower strings against an open drone in the upper register.
Although it’s not possible to play familiar tertian chords in this tuning, it’s quite easy to play tone clusters—dense, dissonant “chords” built from the interval of a second. Tone clusters are impractical to play in standard tuning, but Ostrich tuning makes them readily accessible.
The tuning also presents favorably straightforward conditions for slide playing—either on individual groups of strings, or across the whole neck to produce dramatic glissando effects.
While this tuning saw further use by Reed in his work with the Velvet Underground & Nico, it remains niche. It has also been used by Soundgarden on “Mind Riot” off Badmotorfinger. Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris” uses a closely related variant tuning, with the lowest string tuned to B and the rest to D; a B minor tonality is implied when all strings are strummed open.
It’s ideal to set up a guitar specifically for Ostrich tuning if you think you’ll be using it often. A standard-gauge string set will have some strings tuned quite low and others tuned quite high to achieve an Ostrich tuning.
In this case, the uneven tension across the strings will not be ideal. We will get much better tuning stability and intonation (and a much nicer playing experience) if we select a bespoke set of string gauges that will give us balanced tension across all six strings when we tune the guitar to our pitch class of choice.
In a future post, we’ll look at how I set up a project guitar for C Ostrich tuning.