minstrel: Lute Tuning

[Stephen Fryer]

"Eloise Mason" wrote

> 	I took an alternate-guitar-tunings class where the teacher taught
> us that one as 'The Alternate Tuning from the Universe Next Door' --
> because until Segovia became a supahSTAH with what was then called Spanish
> Tuning (and is now what pretty much everyone uses on guitar), that was the
> standard way to tune a guitar. And it does interesting things to the
> open-chord charts. It makes B a playable key for beginning guitarists, for
> example (at the price of F).

That is simply not correct.  The standard tuning for six string guitars 
has been E-A-D-G-B-E in all the manuals that I know of (Spanish, 
Italian, English, etc.) since at least the beginning of the 19th c. and 
presumably earlier (back to whenever the single-string six course guitar 
was developed sometime in the 18th c.).

Stephen Fryer
AKA Stephen of Hunmanby