The other day I decided to tune my Maton acoustic to Nashville tuning, or 'high strung'. It's a little trick they use in country to fatten up the strumming without too much bassy bottom end booming the sound up. It's still standard tuning, except that the G, D. A and bass E strings are one octave up in pitch.
Here's how you do it:
Leave the E and B strings alone, they stay the same.
Use a 009 or 010 as a G string and tune it up to G, the same G you hear on the 3rd fret of the E string.
Use a 012 as a D string and tune it to D, the same D as you hear on the 3rd fret of the B string,
Use a 016 as A string. Tune it relative to the D string.
Use a 024 wound string as a bottom E. Tune it relative to the A.
Now you have a guitar that's tuned EADGBE as normal, but you'll hear all kinds of nice doubling up of notes emerging. The hardest part is convincing your fingers that you can still play as normal, especially when you hit that really high G string.
I did this little movie of some picking. A high strung and a normal guitar picking away together is a beautiful thing. It's almost, but not quite, a 12 string sound. This tuning is in fact a 12 string without the thick set.
I'll post some more examples soon, show you nice it sounds strummed.
