I recently had an e-mail from Warren Allen, whose 'alternate tunings' webpage link I posted on the list last week, asking if I knew whether Joni had ever learnt to play the guitar in standard tuning (on his site he quotes from Mark Hanson's book 'The Alternate Tunings Guide for Guitar' (Amsco Publications, 1991) that Joni Mitchell "has always played only in alternate tunings. She has never learned to play in standard tuning."
Doing some research I found an article from 'Acoustic Guitar' magazine (August 1996) - http://www.jmdl.com/articles/docs/9608ag.cfm - which states that "only two of her songs 'Tin Angel' and 'Urge for Going' are in standard tuning." Does anyone on the list know if this is correct? I also found the following about her guitar style - in an interview with English guitarist Martin Simpson in Guitar Player (Feb 1995), http://www.jmdl.com/articles/docs/9502gp.cfm which I thought some might enjoy: JM: "When I'm writing, I put the guitar in the tuning first of all-- sometimes a familiar tuning. I have 50 of them now. Sometimes I get lost going between one and the other, and I find a new one. Then I have an adventure ahead of me because I have to figure out the shapes in it in order to retrieve the composition. Once I find six or seven chords, I begin to arrange them in an attractive manner. Because of the way I play now I can't really remember the whole chronology of it. I tend to think of the top three strings as muted trumpets, or the high end of an orchestra--horn stops. I think of the midrange as viola, I guess not violins--but the orchestra's mid-register, say French horn and viola. The thumb is a very sparse, eccentric bass line. Timewise the thumb can play vertically while the rest of the fingers are swinging, which gives a funny kind of Senegalese quality to my shuffle, as if my thumb is playing a monkey chant and the rest of me is swinging somewhere in the U.S.A.--like Robert Johnson on Mars." PaulC np 'Urge for Going' by Shawn Colvin
