How Low Can You Go? An Experiment in Downtuning

Rob Scallon, the dude who covered Slayer and Cannibal Corpse on the banjo and ukulele, wrote a metal song entirely in binary code, and wrote metal lyrics using nothing but quotes from YouTube comments, is back with his latest whacky experiment in whackiness. From Gear Gods:

“This week, he’s taken the quandary posited by Fluff in the video Does De-Tuning Make You Heavier? and put it under the microscope in the name of science. His control is the riff, played the same every time, each time a half step lower than the previous tuning. This means he is continually upping the string gauge every couple tunings, and actually drilling out his tuner posts to fit the larger gauge strings.”

The resulting video is, in the grand Scallon tradition, highly entertaining; by the time he gets to drop Q, the strings are so loose that he’s basically playing on noodles of spaghetti (“noodling on noodles,” if you will). And while I do think the clip proves that the lower you tune the heavier you sound, it also proves that “heavier” is not synonymous for “better.” I mean, the drop Q tuning not only makes the strings looser than Pamela Anderson, it also makes a muddy puddle of indistinct noise.

Watch the video below, then let me know how much you disagree with me in the comments section: