A few years back, even before I had heard much about slack key guitar, I developed an interest in modal tunings for the five-string banjo. With a decent background in music theory, I could figure out chord positions at various positions along the neck for a given tuning, but it was a time-consuming process, and I’m not the most patient person in the world.
As a former software programmer, it made sense to me to think about automating the process of “calculating” chord positions for any tuning, using the power of the computer. So I wrote a program to do that.
Fast forward a couple of years: about the time I was developing an interest in slack key guitar, I ran into George Kahumoku at an acoustic club in San Jose where he was performing. In conversations with George about slack key tunings, I recalled the tunings calculator program, and realized that it could be a useful tool to apply to slack key tunings.
I dusted off the old program, added some new features to it that I thought would be useful to slack key students, and brought it to George’s Slack Key Guitar Workshop on Maui in 2006. The program could print out chord charts, and I ended up printing quite a few for the students at the workshop. Because of the interest expressed by those students and others over time, I eventually compiled a set of chord charts for a variety of tunings into the Slack Key Tunings Manual, which is currently in its fifth edition.
This site and its blog were created to collect feedback from users of the manual so that it can be updated and improved through future editions.