C.I.A. Tuning: How a Moroccan Oud Player Ended Up Inside the Riff of Kashmir

Most guitar lineages travel as songs. Somebody hears a record, learns the shape, plays it back with their own accent, and the idea moves one generation forward. This one travelled as six letters on a tuning peg, and it carried an entire melodic grammar with it.

A Tuning Is Portable Knowledge

Standard tuning is E A D G B E. Drop the first, second and sixth strings a whole tone and you get D A D G A D. On paper it is a small edit. In practice it is a different instrument. The open strings spell a D suspended fourth chord, which means the tuning contains no third at all. It is neither major nor minor until you decide it is. Every shape you move up the neck keeps open strings ringing underneath it, so the guitar stops behaving like a chord machine and starts behaving like something with a drone built in, closer to a set of pipes than to a jazz box.

That was the point. British guitarist Davey Graham arrived at the tuning in the early 1960s while travelling in Morocco, after hearing oud players and wanting the guitar to do what their fretless, fourths-tuned instrument did. He was not trying to invent a folk tool. He was trying to import a modal logic that standard tuning fights you on.

Three Letters, Said Out Loud

Graham put the tuning on record almost immediately, applying it to the Irish traditional She Moved Through the Fair on the 1963 EP From a London Hootenanny, and treating the Irish tune roughly the way an Indian musician would treat a raga. Three traditions in one performance, held together by a tuning.

Jimmy Page was paying attention. His Yardbirds showcase White Summer comes directly out of Graham’s arrangement, and Page later gave the tuning a name that is really just the lineage stated as an acronym. He called it C.I.A. tuning: Celtic, Indian, Arabic. Guitarists usually mythologise their gear. Page instead labelled his with a bibliography.

The line runs from there into Led Zeppelin. Black Mountain Side uses it. So does Kashmir, which is where the idea stops being a folk-club curiosity and becomes one of the most recognisable riffs in rock. That riff sounds enormous and unplaceable for a specific technical reason. The suspended tuning refuses to tell you whether it is happy or sad, and the open strings keep sounding underneath the ascending figure. It is a drone with a rock band standing on it.

What Travelled With Credit and What Did Not

The tuning moved cleanly. The arrangements did not. Black Mountain Side follows Bert Jansch’s reading of the traditional Blackwaterside from his 1966 album Jack Orion, and it went out without crediting him. There is a neat technical detail buried in that dispute: Jansch played his version in drop D, while Page played his in DADGAD. Same tune, different tuning, and the tuning is precisely the part Page had taken from Graham rather than from Jansch.

It is worth sitting with the asymmetry. Graham’s contribution was a method, and methods are almost impossible to own. Jansch’s contribution was a specific arrangement, the kind of thing copyright exists to protect, and it got absorbed anyway. The most transmissible idea in the whole story is also the only one nobody could have been sued over.

The Drone Finds Its Volume

The lineage did not stop at Zeppelin. It split in two directions at once. One branch became the Celtic guitar standard, where the open drones do the job bagpipes do, running through players like Pierre Bensusan and Daithi Sproule and, more recently, Lankum. The other branch got heavier. Steve Von Till of Neurosis works in DADGAD and in a modified A A D G A D. Russian Circles build post-metal out of it. Ben Chasny, Mark Kozelek and Jeff Tweedy all live in it. Sevendust use it downtuned.

That second branch makes sense once you stop thinking of DADGAD as a folk tuning and start thinking of it as a drone tuning. Sludge, doom and post-metal want exactly what Graham wanted from the oud: sustained open strings, modal ambiguity, and riffs that imply a key without ever nailing it down. Sixty years on, the desert is still audible in the amplifier.

The Next Radio covers the guitar music that gets built out of borrowed ideas.