Can anyone help me with learning GBS tunes on the bouzouki?  I am a good guitar player, and I hope that playing this new instrument won't be a long, hard, slog of a steep learning curve for me.

 Any ideas would be appreciated, like the tunings they use and some basic chord structures perhaps.  "Consequence Free" might be a good starting point. 

Malone, NY! We had a great vacation there in the '80s! My younger son insisted on calling it New York Malone. He was only 4 at the time.

Try posting your query in the Music section called - Beat the Drum. We do have people here who play bouzouki and are pretty good at helping people out with music.

Anne

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And when the winds of change begin to blow,
I'll whisper, "You're my lighthouse" in case you didn't know.

Sons of Maxwell

visit my website!:
Anne's Philly Phan Site at http://www.gbsfanatic.com

Moondog - I think if you ask 3 people how they play the bouzouki, you'll get 3 different answers. Everyone I know who plays it is like you (or me) - someone who already played at least one other instrument and just picked it up and made up their own way to play.

I usually play with an open tuning - ADAD. This is great for basic songs. I can either pluck the melody or strum it while hitting the root melody notes. For different keys, I can capo for an easy change (no capo for D, 2nd fret for E, etc.). So if I'm playing in D, an open strum is obviously a D. Hitting the second fret on both pairs of the A gives me a G chord, and the second fret on both pairs of D strings gives me an A chord. These are the basic chord combinations found in most Celtic tunes - If the song is in D, the chords are generally D, G, and A (with an occasional E minor).

For songs with more involved chords (and to play something more appropriate for backup), I tune it to GDAD. This is probably the most common tuning for Celtic bouzouki playing. It makes it easier to play a wider variety of chords, but I can't cheat like I do with the open tuning (just hitting the root notes & strumming).

I can try to answer more specific questions about GBS tunes when I get mine back from my girlfriend.