“I got my fingers rapped with a ruler. They said, ‘Why would you want to compose music?’” Joni Mitchell on why she invented her own guitar language from more than 50 tunings

Joni Mitchell recalls the pain from her earliest attempts to share her songs as a young piano student.

“I got my fingers rapped with a ruler,” she tells Guitar Player. “‘Why would you want to compose music when you could have the masters under your fingers?’”

Mitchell would go on not only to compose music but to invent her own guitar language, eventually creating more than 50 alternate tunings that helped define the harmonic richness of her songwriting.

Unable to form chords traditionally because of weakness in her hands — the lingering effect of childhood polio — Mitchell began turning her guitar’s pegs into open tunings.

Today she uses more than 50 different tunings, taking her well beyond the familiar territories of open E and DADGAD.

But the tunings do more than accommodate her hands. They reshape how she hears the instrument, allowing her to approach the guitar almost like an orchestra. The result is the harmonic richness of her music, with uncommon note choices and combinations.

“I tend to think of the top three strings as muted trumpets,” she says, “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. Tunewise 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.”

The music she heard in her head

As Mitchell recalls, the tunings actually predate her guitar playing, which began when she was 18 after an early flirtation with baritone ukulele.

“I think maybe it arrived first in the piano.”

After her family moved to Saskatoon when she was 11, Mitchell briefly took piano lessons to satisfy her desire to create the music she was already composing in her head.

“I think I had a prodigious creative ability as a musician, but the community that I grew up in disallowed it. I know I wanted to compose for the piano, that I heard music in my head at the age of seven and had to learn it.

But that expression was discouraged.

“The young Mozart was encouraged by his father, and the idea of composition coming at an early age wasn't ruled out,” she offers, “but it certainly was in this little community. The idea of being an original creative person was almost anathema.”

Likewise, learning on her own was frowned upon as something for the underclass.

“Playing by ear was considered to be déclassé. It was really misunderstood and discouraged.”

And yet she was drawn to sounds and musical styles that her lessons never revealed, leaving her to search for them on her own.

“Everything that thrilled me at an early age was harmonically wide and rich,” she says. “I heard a lot of swing music and things like Frank Sinatra. In order for musicians to play that stuff you have to have a background in European harmony and structure. I was hearing and absorbing this music with no real understanding.”

Or any intention of pursuing a music career, for that matter.

“Well, I picked up the guitar — or the ukulele — at the age of 18 with no ambition to have a career in music, just to accompany bawdy drinking songs.”

The melody that changed everything

But privately she was still writing songs, and one piece of music in particular left a permanent impression: Sergei Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini,” specifically its famous 18th variation.

“That still remains the most beautiful melody I ever heard,” she says. “I used to go down to the store where you could take a 78 and go into a glass listening booth, play it, and decide if you wanted it or not. Well, I couldn't buy it because I was a child, but I used to go in and listen from time to time. So that love of melody made me want to create music.

“My next passion was Chuck Berry and rock and roll. That took a different form. I became a dancer, a really serious dancer, doing the Lindy hop and swing dances. Then, at 18, I took up the guitar, and nobody knew who I was anymore.”

“People were always telling me I was playing things wrong”

Playing acoustic guitar brought a new complication: fretting chords. Her open tunings worked for her but confused those she performed with.

“My style was quite different. People were always telling me I was playing things wrong,” says Mitchell, who eventually acquired a Martin D-28 from a soldier in the Vietnam war and went on to composer many of her early songs with it. “When I started to write my own music, then I was the final authority on it.”

But as she later explained, the tunings also allow her to keep discovering new avenues of expression through trial and error.

“If you’re only working off what you know, then you can’t grow,” she told Acoustic Guitar. “It’s only through error that discovery is made, and in order to discover you have to set up some sort of situation with a random element—a strange attractor, using contemporary physics terms.

“The more I can surprise myself, the more I’ll stay in this business, and the twiddling of the notes is one way to keep the pilgrimage going. You’re constantly pulling the rug out from under yourself, so you don’t get a chance to settle into any kind of formula.”