Guns N' Roses tunings.

E♭ Standard is the normal guitar tuning lowered by one semitone on every string: E♭ A♭ D♭ G♭ B♭ E♭ from low to high. The bass does the same, E♭ A♭ D♭ G♭. Chord shapes and fingerings stay exactly as you know them; everything just sounds a half step lower. An open E chord shape becomes E♭, the D shape at the start of Sweet Child o' Mine sounds as D♭, and Bob Dylan's G, D and C on Knockin' on Heaven's Door become G♭, D♭ and B on the Use Your Illusion II version.

Why tune down at all? Slash has given the usual reasons himself: tuning down makes the notes easier to reach for the singer, it loosens the strings, and above all it sounds heavier. Guitar World's breakdown of his Welcome to the Jungle rig lists .010–.046 strings tuned to E♭ Standard, played on a Kris Derrig replica of a 1959 Les Paul through a rented Marshall.

In TuneLit, pick E♭ Standard (or open any Tune button on the album pages) and leave the reference at 440 Hz. Some songs carry a small offset of a few cents, such as "E♭ Standard +8 ¢" for G N' R Lies. That is what we measured, and the Tune buttons already include it, but at that size most ears will not hear the difference in a full band mix.

A word about tabs. On Songsterr, some of the most-viewed versions of Sweet Child o' Mine, November Rain, Welcome to the Jungle and Don't Cry are copies rewritten for E Standard. They are fine for learning the notes, but if you play them in E Standard you will be a half step above the record. Keep the frets as written and tune down a half step instead, and the tab and the record line up.

1986 to 1988: the Hollywood years. The first record, the Live ?!*@ Like a Suicide EP, is already in E♭ Standard: two songs from the Hollywood Rose days and covers of Rose Tattoo and Aerosmith, recorded in a studio with crowd noise added on top. Appetite for Destruction followed in 1987 with the same tuning on every song, guitars and bass. G N' R Lies (1988) put the EP back out as side one and added four acoustic songs, and those acoustics are tuned down a half step too, so Patience is in E♭ like everything else.

1990 to 1993: Use Your Illusion and the covers. The two Use Your Illusion albums are a much wider record: piano ballads, a Wings cover, a Dylan cover, ten-minute epics. The tuning stayed put. Slash told Guitar Player that he used about 20 different guitars on the sessions, among them a Dobro, a six-string bass, a banjo and several acoustics, and he explained the few exceptions himself. The Dobro on You Ain't the First is in standard tuning rather than an open slide tuning; the slide on Bad Obsession is in open G with the low string taken off, a trick he picked up from Keith Richards; and the banjo on Breakdown is a six-string banjo tuned like a guitar. Izzy Stradlin left in late 1991 and Gilby Clarke took over rhythm guitar, so on The Spaghetti Incident? (1993) Clarke re-recorded most of Izzy's parts. Almost all of those covers are tabbed in E♭ as well.

1994 to 2008: Chinese Democracy. By the late 1990s Axl Rose was the only member of the classic line-up left, and Chinese Democracy was recorded over about a decade by a rotating cast: Robin Finck, Buckethead, Ron "Bumblefoot" Thal, Richard Fortus and Paul Tobias on guitars, Tommy Stinson on bass. It is the one album where the tuning moves around: E♭ Standard for most songs, but Drop D, Drop C♯, Drop B and even plain E Standard for others, according to the tabs.

2016 on: the reunion. Slash and Duff McKagan rejoined in 2016, with Richard Fortus on rhythm guitar. Live transcriptions from Tokyo in 1992 to Paris in 2023 keep the classic songs in E♭, and the Chinese Democracy songs the reunion line-up plays keep their own tunings: the Slash and Duff version of Better is tabbed in Drop C♯, like the album. The singles released since 2021, Absurd, Hard Skool, Perhaps, The General, Atlas and Nothin', are all tabbed in E♭ Standard; the tab of The General has Duff on a five-string bass tuned down a half step. TuneLit has not measured any live recording or any of these singles.

Live ?!*@ Like a Suicide (1986)

E♭ Standard +6 ¢4 songs, each with a Tune button

Main tuning: E♭ Standard +6 ¢ (A ≈ 441.5), measured from the same recordings on the Mobile Fidelity CD of G N' R Lies.

The band's first release was a four-song EP on the Uzi Suicide label, made to sound like a live show although it was recorded in a studio. Reckless Life and Move to the City go back to Hollywood Rose; Nice Boys is a Rose Tattoo song and Mama Kin an Aerosmith one. Songsterr's tabs of all four songs put both guitars and the bass in E♭ Standard. One popular Songsterr version of Mama Kin is written for E Standard instead; with that one, tune down a half step to match the record.

The EP was never reissued on its own on CD, so TuneLit measured its four songs on G N' R Lies, where they open the album. They average about 6 cents sharp, with Reckless Life and Nice Boys right at concert pitch and Move to the City, the song with horns, about 8 cents up.

With TuneLit: every Tune button opens E♭ Standard +6 ¢. If you prefer a plain E♭ Standard at 440, you will be only a few cents off.

Appetite for Destruction (1987)

E♭ Standard12 songs, each with a Tune button

Main tuning: E♭ Standard (measured +2 ¢, A ≈ 440.6, stored as plain E♭ Standard).

Every song is in E♭ Standard: Guitar World's rig rundown, Slash's own remarks about tuning down and every Songsterr tab agree. Slash played most of the album on the Derrig Les Paul replica, which he later said became his main studio guitar for almost everything on Appetite. Izzy Stradlin played rhythm guitar, and Duff McKagan's bass is tuned down with the guitars.

TuneLit measured the Mobile Fidelity gold CD (UDCD 699) at about 2 cents sharp, which counts as concert pitch. One song sits a little higher: Out ta Get Me, at about 11 cents sharp, gets its own value.

A few songs need a remark. Sweet Child o' Mine is the most transcribed song the band ever made, and a popular Songsterr version is rewritten for E Standard, so check which one you have. Think About You adds a Slash acoustic guitar in the same E♭ tuning. Paradise City is the one place where TuneLit's semitone check from the audio gets it wrong: the song never rings the open low E♭, so the check points to E. The tab's G, C and F shapes sound as F♯, B and E on the record, which is exactly what a guitar a half step down gives, so E♭ Standard stays.

With TuneLit: E♭ Standard at 440 for every song, with Out ta Get Me at +11 ¢.

G N' R Lies (1988)

E♭ Standard +8 ¢8 songs, each with a Tune button

Main tuning: E♭ Standard +8 ¢ (A ≈ 442), measured on the Mobile Fidelity gold CD (UDCD 748).

Lies joins two short records. Side one is the 1986 EP, described above. Side two is four acoustic songs recorded in a few sessions with producer Mike Clink: Patience, Used to Love Her, a slow acoustic You're Crazy (the way the song was first written; the fast electric take is on Appetite) and One in a Million. Every tab puts the acoustics in E♭ Standard as well, so you do not need a second tuning for this album.

Patience has three acoustic guitars and no drums. Slash plays the lead lines and Izzy and Duff strum; the C, G, A and D shapes of the chord sheets sound as B, G♭, A♭ and D♭ on the record. Patience is also the song that sits apart in the measurement: about 3 cents flat, while Used to Love Her, You're Crazy and One in a Million sit 8 to 10 cents sharp. Patience therefore has its own value, plain E♭ Standard, and the rest of the album uses about +8 ¢.

With TuneLit: E♭ Standard +8 ¢ for most songs; Patience in plain E♭ Standard at 440.

Use Your Illusion I (1991)

E♭ Standard −5 ¢16 songs, each with a Tune button

Main tuning: E♭ Standard −5 ¢ (A ≈ 438.7), measured on the Mobile Fidelity gold CD (UDCD 711).

Songsterr transcribes the electric guitars and bass of all sixteen songs in E♭ Standard, from Right Next Door to Hell to the ten-minute Coma, and from the Wings cover Live and Let Die to November Rain, where Slash's solos sit over Axl Rose's piano. Izzy Stradlin sings lead on Dust N' Bones, You Ain't the First and Double Talkin' Jive, and Axl plays the acoustic intro of Dead Horse.

Three songs do something special, and two of them have Slash's own explanation:

• The Garden is the one song listed in its own tuning. Songsterr writes one acoustic part in Drop C♯ (C♯ G♯ C♯ F♯ A♯ D♯) while every electric guitar and the bass stay in E♭ Standard. Drop C♯ is simply E♭ Standard with the low string lowered a whole step more, so only that string changes. TuneLit's check from the audio hears the low C♯ all over the record, which supports the tab. Wikipedia credits the acoustic guitars to Slash and co-writer West Arkeen; Alice Cooper sings with Axl.
• Bad Obsession has its riffs in E♭ Standard, and a slide part Slash played on a Travis Bean in five-string open G (G D G B D, the low string removed). One Songsterr transcription writes that slide part a half step down, as C♯ F♯ C♯ F♯ A♯ C♯, which fits the rest of the band. The song is listed in E♭ Standard; tune a second guitar to open G down a half step if you want the slide.
• You Ain't the First has Slash on Dobro, and he said it is in standard tuning, not an open slide tuning. The tabs put it a half step down with the band.

Double Talkin' Jive ends with a classical guitar solo Slash played on a Ramírez, again in the band's tuning according to the tabs.

The measurement puts the album about 5 cents flat. No single song strays far enough to get its own value; Live and Let Die reads lowest at about 11 cents flat. TuneLit's semitone check confirms the listed tuning on thirteen of the sixteen songs. On Live and Let Die it points to E, because the song never plays the open low E♭ (the rhythm guitars' lowest note in the tab is the third fret), and on November Rain because something on the record, most likely the piano and orchestra, goes below the bass's lowest string. Neither is a reason to doubt the tabs.

With TuneLit: E♭ Standard −5 ¢ for the album, The Garden in Drop C♯ −5 ¢.

Use Your Illusion II (1991)

E♭ Standard14 songs, each with a Tune button

Main tuning: E♭ Standard (measured −3 ¢, A ≈ 439.2, stored as plain E♭ Standard).

The same sessions and the same tuning as Part I. Civil War, recorded in 1990, is the last song with Steven Adler on drums; its acoustic intro and the electric parts are both tabbed in E♭. Knockin' on Heaven's Door uses Dylan's chord shapes, so with the guitars a half step down it sounds in G♭. Izzy Stradlin sings 14 Years, Duff McKagan sings So Fine, and Izzy plays a Coral electric sitar on Pretty Tied Up, tabbed in E♭ like the guitars. Slash's banjo on Breakdown is a six-string banjo tuned like a guitar, so a guitar in E♭ covers that part too.

TuneLit measured the album about 3 cents flat, which counts as concert pitch, and the songs sit close together. The one exception is My World, Axl's short closing track with drum machine and keyboards and no guitars at all, which sits about 20 cents sharp; it has its own value, but there is nothing on it to play along with on guitar.

One song is worth a careful listen. On Get in the Ring the riff sits on E, A and D, which in E♭ tuning are all first-fret notes, and TuneLit's check from the audio hears a low D that E♭ Standard cannot reach. The only tab says E♭ Standard and no other source names a different tuning, so the listing stays E♭; if it does not sit right, check the low string by ear. Estranged is the other song the check could not settle, because notes below the bass's lowest string, most likely from the keyboards, confuse it.

With TuneLit: E♭ Standard at 440 for every song.

The Spaghetti Incident? (1993)

E♭ Standard +7 ¢12 songs, each with a Tune button

Main tuning: E♭ Standard +7 ¢ (A ≈ 441.7), measured on a 1993 Geffen CD (GED 24617).

The covers album started as a way to blow off steam during the Use Your Illusion sessions and grew into twelve listed songs, mostly punk and glam: the Damned, the U.K. Subs, the New York Dolls, the Stooges, the Dead Boys, T. Rex, Nazareth, the Misfits, Johnny Thunders and Fear, plus the Skyliners' doo-wop song Since I Don't Have You. Gilby Clarke re-recorded most of Izzy Stradlin's rhythm parts, and Duff McKagan sings several songs. An unlisted hidden track follows the last song; it is not part of the list here.

Songsterr puts ten of the twelve songs in E♭ Standard. The other two:

• Raw Power, the Stooges song, is transcribed in E Standard on both Songsterr and Ultimate Guitar, guitars and bass alike, so it is listed that way. The song never touches the open low string, which means TuneLit's audio check cannot tell E from E♭ here; it is one of the songs worth checking by ear.
• New Rose, the Damned song, is the opposite case. Both Songsterr tabs are labelled Drop C♯, but neither ever plays the dropped string, and Ultimate Guitar's tabs are split between E♭ and E Standard. On the record TuneLit's check hears E♭ as the lowest open note, often, and almost no low C♯. It is listed in E♭ Standard, which plays every note of the Drop C♯ tabs as well.

This album is the least uniform measurement of the five. Songs recorded at different times sit anywhere from about 3 cents flat to 16 cents sharp, and the album value of +7 ¢ is the middle of that spread. Hair of the Dog, with Slash on talk box, sits highest and gets its own +16 ¢; Raw Power and I Don't Care About You sit close to concert pitch and get their own values as well. Ain't It Fun, Black Leather and Since I Don't Have You also read close to 440 but stay with the album, as their difference falls under TuneLit's threshold.

With TuneLit: E♭ Standard +7 ¢ for most songs; Hair of the Dog at +16 ¢; Raw Power in E Standard; I Don't Care About You in E♭ Standard at 440.

Chinese Democracy (2008)

E♭ Standard14 songs, each with a Tune button

Main tuning: E♭ Standard, from tabs. This album is not in TuneLit's library, so nothing here is measured.

Fourteen songs, almost ten years of sessions and at least five guitarists made this the band's most varied album for tuning. Eight songs stay in the classic E♭ Standard: Street of Dreams, There Was a Time, Catcher in the Rye, Scraped, Riad N' the Bedouins, I.R.S., This I Love and Prostitute. The rest, according to the tabs:

• Chinese Democracy, the title track, is transcribed in Drop D at standard pitch, a half step above the band's usual tuning, on Songsterr and Ultimate Guitar alike.
• Shackler's Revenge is the lowest and the least certain: Songsterr and the best-rated Guitar Pro tab on Ultimate Guitar use Drop B (B F♯ B E G♯ C♯), while other tabs use Drop C♯ and one Drop B♭. It is listed in Drop B as disputed.
• Better is mostly transcribed in Drop C♯, which keeps the band's E♭ on the top five strings; one newer Songsterr version has Drop D instead. The live version played since 2016 with Slash and Duff is tabbed in Drop C♯ too.
• Sorry is in Drop D on both Songsterr tabs, but the best-rated Guitar Pro tab on Ultimate Guitar uses E♭. Listed in Drop D as disputed.
• If the World and Madagascar are transcribed in plain E Standard on Songsterr, while several Ultimate Guitar tabs use E♭. Both are listed in E Standard as disputed.
• This I Love keeps the guitars in E♭ Standard, but Songsterr has Tommy Stinson's bass with its low string dropped to C♯.

Because none of this is measured, treat the disputed ones as a starting point: tune as listed, play the opening riff with the record, and if it sounds a half step off, move to the other tuning named in the song's notes.

TuneLit's recording analysis reads 90 seconds of each song and finds how far the music sits from the A 440 grid. It knows the offset only within one semitone, so the semitone itself (E♭ rather than D or E) comes from the tabs and sources; a second check, from the audio, then asks whether the lowest open string really sits where the tabs say.

Songs with their own value: Out ta Get Me (+11 ¢), Patience (0), My World (+20 ¢, no guitars), Hair of the Dog (+16 ¢), Raw Power (0, E Standard) and I Don't Care About You (0).

The main finding is how ordinary these numbers are. Every Guns N' Roses album we measured sits within about 8 cents of concert pitch, an amount most players will not hear in a full band mix. Where Pantera's records need a different reference A and early Metallica's an offset of 15 to 20 cents, Guns N' Roses records need only the E♭ tuning itself.

Four of the five albums were measured on Mobile Fidelity's gold "Original Master Recording" CDs from 1997 and 1999, which are remasters. As a sanity check, TuneLit also measured the same songs on the 2004 Greatest Hits CD: there the Appetite songs read about 3 cents lower and the Use Your Illusion songs 3 to 7 cents higher, while Patience and the two Spaghetti Incident? songs read the same. So different CD editions of these records can differ by a few cents, and anything under about 6 cents on this page is best read as "in tune at A 440".

The semitone check from the audio agrees with the listed tuning on 51 of the 62 measured recordings, including The Garden's low C♯. It points to E on Paradise City and Live and Let Die, which never play the open low string, and on November Rain, where piano and orchestra go below the bass; those are known blind spots of the method, and the tabs stand. It points to D on Get in the Ring, the one real question mark on these records. Seven more leave it unsure, mostly because their lowest notes come from keyboards or because, like Raw Power, they never ring the open low string.

Every tuning on the album pages carries a status label. For Guns N' Roses most of them read Measured by TuneLit, because the offset comes from our own analysis of the CD. The tuning name, E♭ Standard or Drop C♯, still rests on the other kinds of evidence:

• Official: a band member said it. No tuning on these pages rests on that alone, but Slash's Guitar Player interview about Use Your Illusion explains the slide on Bad Obsession, the Dobro on You Ain't the First and the banjo on Breakdown, and the song notes use it.
• Widely reported: trusted outlets agree. Appetite for Destruction's E♭ Standard is in Guitar World's rig rundown and fits Slash's own reasons for tuning down.
• Community: community transcriptions, mostly Songsterr, cross-checked with Ultimate Guitar where possible. Most song-level tunings rest here, including The Garden, Raw Power and every Chinese Democracy entry.
• Disputed: the sources disagree, as with New Rose, Shackler's Revenge, Sorry, If the World and Madagascar. We list the best-supported option and name the other in the notes.
• Measured by TuneLit: our analysis of a CD gives the offset in cents. Only numbers are published; the audio is never stored or shared.

If a song still sounds a touch off, move the reference by a hertz or so; around 440 Hz, one hertz is about 4 cents.

• Everything from 1986 to 1993: E♭ Standard (E♭ A♭ D♭ G♭ B♭ E♭), bass E♭ A♭ D♭ G♭, reference A 440.
• Live ?!*@ Like a Suicide (1986): E♭ Standard +6 ¢.
• Appetite for Destruction (1987): E♭ Standard at 440; Out ta Get Me +11 ¢.
• G N' R Lies (1988): E♭ Standard +8 ¢, acoustics included; Patience at 440.
• Use Your Illusion I (1991): E♭ Standard −5 ¢. The Garden: Drop C♯ (one acoustic part). Bad Obsession: slide in open G a half step down, riffs in E♭.
• Use Your Illusion II (1991): E♭ Standard at 440. My World has no guitars. Get in the Ring: check by ear.
• The Spaghetti Incident? (1993): E♭ Standard +7 ¢; Hair of the Dog +16 ¢. Raw Power: E Standard. New Rose: E♭ Standard (Songsterr says Drop C♯, never played).
• Chinese Democracy (2008, from tabs): E♭ Standard; Drop D for Chinese Democracy and Sorry, Drop C♯ for Better, Drop B for Shackler's Revenge, E Standard for If the World and Madagascar; This I Love with the bass dropped to C♯.
• Since 2016: the classics in E♭ live; the new singles tabbed in E♭.
• Golden rule: if a tab sounds a semitone sharp, it was written for E Standard. Keep the frets and tune down a half step.