Napalm Death · Harmony Corruption · song 10
Suffer the Children tuning.
Suffer the Children (Napalm Death, 1990) is in D Standard at concert pitch (A 440).
Not measured yet
TuneLit has not measured this record. The tuning comes from official sources, at concert pitch unless they say otherwise.
Napalm Death · Harmony Corruption · 1990
About Suffer the Children
The best-known song of Harmony Corruption (1990), the first Napalm Death album with Mitch Harris and Jesse Pintado on guitar, recorded at Morrisound in Tampa with Scott Burns. It is in D Standard, every string a whole step down (D G C F A D). This is the one Napalm Death tuning a band member has named: Harris said the band tuned up to standard D for this album, higher than on the Mentally Murdered EP, and the fast chord riffs became much easier to hear.
TuneLit has not measured Harmony Corruption, which is not in its library, so the tuning comes from Harris and the tabs and is at concert pitch, A 440. The Songsterr tab and a Guitar Pro file rated by 37 players both use D Standard, as does every tab of the album TuneLit found.
The trap is the half step. The albums either side of this one, From Enslavement to Obliteration and Utopia Banished, are tabbed in C♯ Standard, so a riff learned from a tab of those eras sits a half step low against this record. Tuning up here means up from C♯ to D, not back to E.
Tip: Tune to D Standard at A 440 and check your open low D against the record; if every riff rubs by a half step, you are probably playing from a C♯ tab of another era.
Step by step
Tune your guitar like the record
- Tap Tune like this: the tuner switches to D Standard, the notes Suffer the Children was recorded in.
- From E Standard: Every string down a whole step. No tuner that knows D Standard? Clamp a capo across fret 2, tune to E Standard as usual, then take it off: every string drops to D Standard. Check each string again afterwards, since a capo pulls the strings a little sharp.
- Turn String 6 to String 1 until each shows ✓ in tune. Suffer the Children sits at concert pitch on the record, so the tuner stays at A 440.
- Then play Suffer the Children along with the record: its lowest open note and your String 6 should ring together without a wobble.
Or the other way round
Move the record into your tuning
Rather keep your guitar as it is? Let Play along move Suffer the Children instead. Add your own copy, for example from your CD (it never leaves your device); the link already says the song is in D Standard. Choose E Standard at A 440 and Suffer the Children moves up 2 half steps, at its own speed. Slow it down or loop a few bars to learn it, and save the result as a WAV file.
Questions
What tuning is Suffer the Children in?
D Standard: D G C F A D, low to high.