“I can’t play proper barre chords. It’s a blessing in disguise – I’ve ended up finding more interesting chords”: KT Tunstall’s 5 guitar tips to boost your songwriting skills

KT Tunstall: My 5 guitar tips to boost your songwriting skills - YouTube

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Sometimes fate plays a big hand in how the world sees you. Back in February 2004, KT Tunstall was propelled to stardom courtesy of a last-minute booking on the BBC TV show Later With Jools Holland.

Armed with a guitar, tambourine and a looper pedal (an Akai HeadRush, to be precise), she wowed the studio and TV audiences with a vibrant, rhythmically fueled rendition of Black Horse and the Cherry Tree.

Since then, the song has gone on to become a modern acoustic hit, loved and performed by her (and many others) around the world. It originally featured on her debut album, Eye To The Telescope, along with another classic, Suddenly I See.

To celebrate 20 years since its release, the album has been reissued with additional B-sides, live tracks and three new songs. Tunstall has a world tour that starts in the US from March, and then journeys to Australia, New Zealand, UK and Croatia, before returning to the US towards the end of the year.

Talking to Guitar World, Tunstall has been kind enough to sit down with her acoustic guitar (and dog!) to cover five elements of her guitar playing and songwriting that she feels enrich her music.

KT Tunstall - Black Horse & The Cherry Tree (Later Archive 2004) - YouTube

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During the video you’ll see her perform segments of her hits and how she developed her rock-solid strumming technique. As she states in the video... “the foundation of playing for me is rhythm. You’ve got to have an extremely stable foundational rhythm in your playing.”

Following this, she uncovers her chord sophistication, which is often borne from avoiding barre chords. “One of the very noticeable things about my playing is I can’t play proper barre chords. It’s a blessing in disguise because I’ve ended up finding more interesting chords and using a lot of open string voicings.”

To enrich her music vocabulary, she has various picking approaches that extend interest in each chord's duration. As she discloses, “One of the patterns I’ve always really enjoyed playing around with is going outside, outside, inside, inside.” Certainly, if you’ve been struggling to learn Silent Sea with its ear catching G(b5) chord, you’ll find this picking approach here.

For her final insights, she explains the fun that can be found playing melodies on the guitar, specifically playing riffs that she also sings. Feel It All is one example where her strumming/picking style shapes a riff that she also sings. “I had to teach myself the melody which wasn’t difficult, but it’s making sure it sounds the way I sing it. The vocal is perfectly following the guitar riff, which I love.”

And almost as a means of summing up her unique tutorial video here, she leans in towards the end to emphasize “even if you get this really simply, it makes you sound like a really good guitar player.”

• Visit www.kttunstall.com for further info about the re-issue of Eye To The Telescope and tour dates/venues.