Aging & Wisdom Quote by Leo Kottke

Kottke is puncturing one of guitar culture's favorite myths: that alternate tunings are a shortcut to originality. Open tunings promise instant atmosphere - drones, ringing harmonics, a built-in sense of "depth" - and that promise is exactly the trap. They hand you a signature sound before you've earned a personal one. The listener gets the shimmer; the player gets the illusion of discovery. Then the shimmer becomes a stencil.

His line about it being "really hard not to sound like an open tuning" is the tell. He's not condemning the technique; he's naming its strongest feature as its most limiting. Open tunings advertise themselves. They want you to lean on the same chord shapes, the same sympathetic strings, the same slide-friendly voicings. If you don't fight the tuning, the tuning plays you.

The second half is even more practical, almost pedagogical: "what you learn in one open tuning is going to stay there". That's Kottke thinking like a working musician who has to build a vocabulary that travels. Standard tuning is a lingua franca; open tunings can become dialects so local they strand you. You can spend months mastering a beautiful corner of the instrument only to realize it doesn't translate to the next song, the next gig, the next guitar.

Context matters: Kottke came up as an acoustic innovator in the 60s and 70s, when alternate tunings were a frontier and also a fashion. His warning reads like a veteran's antidote to gear-and-trick romanticism: novelty is cheap; portability and phrasing are the real flex.