Eli5. Why are different fretted instruments (guitar, mandolin, banjo, etc) tuned differently? Wouldn’t it be easier if they all were the same?
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For a large number of purposes.
First, these instruments have been invented by separate communities of people and each of them tuned those to their understanding. We can take a mandolin and tune it into EBGDAE tuning, but it won’t be a traditional mandolin sound anymore.
Second, even the guitar has lots of variants of tuning depending on what you want to do with it. You can tune it to sound as F#maj7 on open strings if you wish. So actually learning something that is unified is not a good way of learning.
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