Guitarist notes own open-tuning approach

Bowen Swersey had never given much thought to the way he played the guitar until last year.

He started playing the guitar 15 years ago, and learned how to play with open tunings to Joni Mitchell songs two years later. Open tunings are a method of tuning that requires no fingers on the fretboard to play major chords, and which produces a markedly different sound than standard tunings.

Swersey has gone from being a Colgate University coffeehouse musician to becoming, with wife Miriam Broady, the heart of the Beatroots, a world-beat rock band based in Hancock County.

With the Beatroots, he sings and plays acoustic guitar, saxophone and bamboo flute. He’s also the owner of Dragonbone Fluteworks, and makes and sells shakuhachi, transverse and walkingstick flutes.

But he never understood that he had something new to offer concerning the guitar until 2000.

“Miriam has been giving guitar lessons, and she would send students with questions about open tunings to me,” he said. “We realized that we had a totally different theoretical approach to the instrument, that the guitar is a different sort of instrument depending what tuning it’s in. That’s when I realized I had something different.”

He checked other open-tuning books, but none were taking his approach. So he sat down to develop his own book.

The result is “Mr. Bowen’s Open Tuning Secrets,” an instructional book aimed at intermediate guitar players that can be used alone or with Swersey’s open-tuning workshops. He has one of those planned from 1-5 p.m. Sunday above the Eden Rising store on Cottage Street in Bar Harbor. Future workshops are set for June 24 at Southwest Harbor, July 15 in the Camden-Rockport area, and July 21 at Knapp’s in Bangor.

The book took Swersey about three months, on and off, to prepare. He would design a page on the computer, then pass it about to guitar-playing friends for feedback. Their positive response convinced him that he was onto something.

“This has opened up a discussion for me again, a whole new plateau of learning,” he said.

His first workshop included two teachers as students.

“They said they’d learned a lot and really liked it,” Swersey said.

For more further or to register for classes, call 244-5325 or e-mail dragonbone@acadia.net.