Well, one thing that leads us here is the idea of expanding the strike zone. I love the "regular" mandolin, but having been hatched as a guitarist, and as a fan of low frequencies (all hail the great bassists!), I love spending time with the lower brethren and cistern, er, cittern, emm, the lower pitched instruments. What's cool about a regular OM tuning as a point of departure is that everything you know about mandolin is not wrong- the fretboard layout is the same; just the fingering needs to be dealt with (unless you like your left hand in a cast). Expand down a 5th and you have a 'cello with a high E on top...keeping all your repertoire of fiddle tunes etc. easily accessible, but allowing you to shoot down into the Godzilla zone when you want to.
That high G that NST advocates like on top allows for less stretching between the top two strings, where much melodic action happens. My personal beef with that string is that it usually sounds overly bright in contrast to the rest of the tuning, and for extended 7th chords it doesn't have a lot to offer in terms of "tensions" or color notes on top of the chords.
I figured someone was leveraging that G string, and would eventually show us all why it makes sense. Until then, I pretty much avoid it like it's not there - With the exception of a few old autopilot licks that yield new 'freebie' melodic surprises when applied to the E and G strings. That's cheating, though.
I have another 10-string on the way. I anticipate possibly doing more with "altered" tunings; I'm inspired to try to do more, perhaps compositionally, to sort of assuage my compulsion for baroque guitar--which I rarely play these days since becoming so smitten with CBOM--and droning, modal double course. So, I'm dabbling increasingly with fingerstyle approaches and I'm hoping a longer-sustaining 10-string will facilitate this approach and inspire me to continue, perhaps even with some altered tunings.
Well, it's three months later...and I've succombed back to the guitar. (doh!)
So, catmandu2, did you succumb to just standard-tuned guitar, or have you taken the full fifths plunge? I've been trying to break out of using my mandofones as mando-family instruments, and instead am working to treat the full fifths as an altered fingerstyle tuning.
"Altered fingerstyle tuning" is exactly what I aspired to back in...May. But I unexpectedly got a gig playing flamenco/bossa nova guitar (I had filed off my classical nails for good!) about a month ago, and have since been playing guitar again. I forgot how much I love it. So, yeah, standard tuned...but I play a lot of other styles using various other tunings, too, so my compulsion to jack around with tunings is assuaged! So, I ain't messin with 5ths on my CBOM...I'm just goin at them with a pick like giant mando..
