Sonic Youth almost never retuned a guitar. They picked up a different one. Every instrument in the rack was strung, tuned and taped for exactly one job. Here is what was on all of them, why it sounded like that, and what it takes to put it on yours.
Both Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo came out of Glenn Branca's massed-guitar ensembles in early-eighties New York, where a dozen guitars were tuned to specific pitches from the harmonic series and played as one enormous instrument. Ranaldo has described Branca deciding to tune his guitars like a choir
. Ranaldo, Uncut
What they carried out of that room was not a theory. It was a permission slip. The band's early instruments were pawnshop junk, and Ranaldo has said the guitars would not hold a normal tuning, so they started using them more as noise-making devices
. Ranaldo, Elektron, 2018
The turning point came right after Confusion Is Sex. Moore stumbled into F♯F♯F♯F♯EB and called it the first real tuning that was sort of notated
. Moore, Guitarist, 2015 Songs came out of it immediately, and the method was set: find a tuning, write in it, dedicate a guitar to it, never take it apart.
you were a beginner all over again. Ranaldo's argument was that it threw out everything he already knew about the fretboard, which was the point.Lee Ranaldo, LEO Weekly
I almost felt like I had to work against learning how to play.Kim Gordon, NPR, 2015
Unison and octave pairs. Two strings tuned to the same pitch never land on exactly the same frequency. The tiny difference produces amplitude beating, which your ear reads as a natural chorus. Stack four of them and you get the liquid, ringing, slightly seasick drone that is the band's fingerprint. On the strips below, unison pairs are bracketed underneath.
A narrow range. Standard EADGBE spans two octaves. Joe Gore, writing on the band's setups, noted that in their tunings the distance between the highest and lowest strings was usually an octave or less
. Joe Gore, Premier Guitar That compression is why both guitarists could play melodies by barring straight across, and why the two guitars sit on top of each other without either one disappearing.
Six letters, lowest string first. GGDDGG means strings six and five are both G, four and three are both D, two and one are both G.
Almost no source writes octaves down. The octave placements here are playable reconstructions, chosen so the tension math works. Where a tuning has a well-known alternate voicing it is flagged in the panel.
Confirmed means liner notes, an interview, or the techs' own gear list. Reported means a single solid secondary source. Transcribed means fans worked it out by ear. Trust accordingly.
The fingerings are positions that produce the character of the tuning and, where noted, the shape a specific part sits in. They are not note-for-note transcriptions.
Every label is a guitar that lived in one tuning. Pick one to hear it, see the shapes, and get a string set built for it.
They almost never played the same tuning at the same time. Moore described it plainly: Lee would either double him in unison or invent something complementary, and it was never discussed.
This is the mechanism most people miss. Play both parts and listen to what the two tunings do to each other. Then play them together.
Pick a tuning, pick a guitar, and this builds you a set. The math is the industry-standard tension formula, so these are real pounds, not vibes.
T = UW × (2 × L × f)² ÷ 386.4 · L in inches, f in Hz, UW derived from string diameter and construction
Three quarters of an inch of scale length changes everything. The same gauge at the same pitch carries about 11% more tension on 25.5" than on 24.75", because tension scales with the square of the string length. That one number decides which guitar gets which tuning.
Give it the slack tunings. CGDGCD, EGDGED, DDDDAA, DADABD. Anything with a low C or a low D benefits from the extra length, which keeps the fat strings from turning to spaghetti and holds the intonation together.
Give it the tuned-up tunings. F♯F♯F♯F♯EB, AAEEAA, EEBBEF♯. That 11% tension discount is exactly what you want when strings are going above standard pitch, and the fixed bridge does not care what the total load is.
Everything is tuned down from standard, so it is close to a normal 11 set and costs you almost no setup work. Learn Rain on Tin, Stones and The Empty Page. This tuning is the highest reward-to-hassle ratio in the whole catalogue and it makes you write differently within a week.
The iconic one, and the one that will teach you the most about tension. Kool Thing, 100%, Star Power. Two of the strings go well above standard pitch, so build it light on top and expect to change the first string more often than you would like. If the B keeps snapping, voice it an octave lower and use a .014.
Lee's tuning on one guitar, Thurston's on the other, and now you can hear what this band actually was. Record a loop in one and play the other over it. Everything in the interlock section above is built to be practised exactly this way.
The tuning lore is not gospel. Chris Lawrence's tuning tutorial on sonicyouth.com is the closest thing to a canonical list, and it was assembled from set lists, headstock photographs and interviews over many years. Lawrence flags his own uncertainties, including that printed liner-note tunings may not be accurate.
Octaves are the weakest link. Almost no source records them. Several entries in the fan lists say outright that the compiler is unsure whether two strings are in unison or an octave apart. Every octave placement in this document is a reconstruction chosen so the string tension lands in a playable range, cross-checked against the band's own published gauge charts.
Multi-guitar songs use multiple simultaneous tunings. Where you see one tuning attached to a song title, that is usually a simplification of a two-guitar arrangement.
The theft numbers vary. Contemporary reporting in 1999 described roughly two dozen customised guitars taken. The fan-run gear guide later catalogued a larger set. Both agree the truck turned up empty in downtown Los Angeles a few days later.