All three tunings on this page are fiddle tunings. The mandolin took them wholesale, because it is tuned in fifths like a fiddle and plays the same dance repertoire, and Fiddle Warrior is where the fuller set lives with the bow arm’s side of the story. What these pages add is the half a fiddler never has to think about: a mandolin course is two strings, so every retune here is done twice and has to land in unison, and the chop chord that mandolin rhythm is built on stops being true the moment a course moves.
Everything numeric below is derived from the registry’s own pitches. The only thing typed by hand is each tuning’s list of target note names.
The three cross-tunings
| Tuning | Courses | Moved | Open strings read as |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cross A | AEAE | 2 | no triad at all |
| Sawmill | GDGD | 2 | no triad at all |
| High bass | ADAE | 1 | Dsus2 or Asus4 |
Two letters, not four
Read the last column carefully. Standard G D A E sounds four different letters, and so does no chord at all — four notes stacked in fifths do not make a triad. Cross A and sawmill sound only two letters between all four courses, which is a stronger statement than “no triad”: there is no third anywhere in the open set, and there cannot be, because the set has only two pitch classes in it. That is the entire sound of a cross-tuned mandolin. It is not major and not minor, and it will not become either until your fingers put a third somewhere.
The derivation also shows something the names hide: sawmill is cross A moved down a whole tone, note for note, on every single course. They are one tuning in two keys. If you can play in one you can play in the other by moving your hand two frets, which is not true of any other pair on this site.
A course is two strings
This is where the mandolin parts company with the fiddle. Every “string” on the table above is a pair tuned in unison, so moving one course means turning two tuners and then reconciling them with each other. A pair that is four cents apart sounds like chorus on a standard tuning and sounds like a mistake on a drone tuning, because a drone is doing nothing but ringing and there is nothing else for the ear to listen to. Retune slowly, check the pair against itself before you check it against the neighbouring course, and expect to come back to it after five minutes as the new tension settles.
The tension arithmetic matters too. Cross A raises two courses — that is four strings pulled tighter, on an instrument whose top is already under considerable load. Going up is always the riskier direction, and it is a good reason to prefer high bass, which raises one course, when you only want the drone. The strings guide covers gauge, which is the part of this you can actually control.
What happens to the chop
The chop is a closed four-note shape with no open strings in it, fretted against G D A E, and it is the reason a mandolin sits in a bluegrass band at all. Every one of these tunings breaks it, because every one of them moves at least one course, and a closed shape by definition touches every course it spans. The shapes on the chord pages are all in the same position: correct for standard, wrong by exactly the moved course’s delta for anything else.
That is not an argument against cross-tuning. It is an argument that cross-tuning is for a different job — playing melody over a drone, in a fiddle tune, in one key — and that you retune back before the rhythm set. Old-time players who live in these tunings do not chop; they play the tune. If the band needs both in one night, that is what a second mandolin is for.