There are musicians who master an instrument, and then there are musicians who reinvent it. Jacob Collier sits firmly in the second category.
The Grammy Award-winning multi-instrumentalist, composer, and producer has spent his career approaching music with a curiosity that most of us can only aspire to — and when he turned his attention to the guitar, he didn’t do it the conventional way. He designed his own instrument, invented his own tuning, and built an entirely personal musical language from the ground up.
When Jacob came into the studio for a conversation, he brought two guitars with him: his Taylor acoustic five-string and a custom Strandberg electric built to match.
What followed was one of the most fascinating discussions about the guitar I’ve ever had, touching on everything from custom tunings and triad inversions to picking technique and the philosophy of learning.
The Origin Story: A Tenor Guitar in a London Music Shop
Jacob’s path to the guitar started not with a standard six-string, but with a four-string tenor guitar he found at Hobgoblin Music on Rathbone Place in London’s Soho district — a shop he describes as a candy store for a curious 17-year-old.
The tenor guitar was tuned in fifths, similar to a mandolin or violin, and it immediately made more sense to Jacob’s ears than a standard guitar. He was already a bassist and a pianist, and the guitar’s conventional tuning — built around fourths — had always felt like a maze he couldn’t find his way into. The fifths-based tuning gave him something he could map onto what he already knew.
From there, he began dreaming of something more: a guitar that combined fifths on the lower strings with fourths on the upper strings, giving him both the wide, drony intervallic language of the former and the more familiar melodic territory of the latter. He carried that idea in his head for years before finally approaching Taylor with the concept.
Their answer was yes — and that conversation changed everything.
The Five-String Guitar
The instrument Jacob plays today — a five-string guitar on a six-string neck, tuned D-A-E-A-D. The extra string width gives each string more space, making it feel open and expressive in a way a standard neck doesn’t quite allow.
The tuning has a mirror-like symmetry at its heart: descending octaves on either side of the middle string, with the lower strings tuned in fifths and the upper strings in a more familiar fourth-based relationship. The practical result is that basic major chord shapes are immediately intuitive — a simple two-finger barre gives you a full, resonant major chord that you can move anywhere on the neck.
But the real magic is in what those open strings do harmonically. Because of the tuning, the lower two strings can often just hang while Jacob works through voicings on the upper three — and those open drones create a built-in ninth that gives every chord an inherent richness.
One of his favorite voicings, he told me, is a chord he would simply never have found on a standard guitar. The tuning gave it to him.
For Jacob, this is the whole point. Rather than learning a language someone else built, he built one of his own — and then spent years becoming fluent in it.
Harmony Through Simplicity
One of the things that struck me most about Jacob’s approach is how the constraints of the instrument actually free him harmonically. With only three strings to work with on the upper half of the guitar, he’s essentially working in triads — three-note chords and their inversions — and that simplicity, he says, pushes him toward a harmonic directness that he doesn’t always find at the piano.
The guitar brings out a kind of simplicity of harmonic language in him. That’s a remarkable thing to hear from someone of Jacob’s harmonic sophistication. But it makes sense: when you’re limited to three notes, every choice matters more. You can’t pad a chord with doublings or extensions. The triad has to do all the work.
What he does with those triads, though, is anything but simple. He builds sequences, colors changes with inversions, and uses common tones as pivot points to move through harmony in ways that sound inevitable once you hear them. The relationship between the droning lower strings and the moving upper voices creates a texture that’s both ancient-sounding and completely modern.
The influence of Joni Mitchell came up here too — Jacob mentioned spending time with her at the Grammys this year, where he performed alongside her, and talking about alternate tunings.
Her philosophy resonated deeply: different tunings evoke different spirits, different moods, different lyrics. They guide you somewhere you wouldn’t otherwise go. Jacob approaches his own tuning with exactly that same openness.
Technique: Both Hands Doing Unusual Things
Jacob is the first to admit that his technique is completely bespoke to this instrument. He approaches the guitar more like a pianist or bassist than a conventional guitarist, and it shows in both hands.
On the left hand, years of double bass playing gave him serious finger strength and dexterity. He leans heavily on the left hand for expression — hammer-ons, pulls, inflections — while the right hand often stays relatively quiet, entering with purpose when needed rather than strumming constantly. It’s a kind of economy of motion that feels entirely natural once you watch him play.
His picking technique, when he uses it, involves strumming upward with the index finger and mixing in thumb picking for a hybrid approach. He anchors on the bridge rather than floating his right hand, which gives him stability and allows for more controlled, dynamic picking.
On the left hand, Jacob drops his hand position very low on the neck when he needs extra reach for certain chord shapes — it’s an unconventional approach, but one that simply works for him.
We also got onto the subject of Hendrix, whose thumb-over-the-top technique is equally unorthodox by traditional standards. Two very different solutions to the same problem, and both completely valid.
The Electric: A Custom Strandberg
For the electric side of things, Jacob plays a custom five-string Strandberg — built to the same tuning as his acoustic, after Jacob met Ola Strandberg in Stockholm in 2022 and showed him the acoustic. Within a few weeks, the first prototype arrived.
The Strandberg opens up things the acoustic can’t quite do — particularly wide bends, something Jacob was never able to explore in the same way before. And the modern, ergonomic design feels right to him in a way that a traditional electric guitar body might not.
Since he came to the guitar without decades of association with the sounds of vintage amps and classic pickups, there’s no nostalgia pulling him toward a Strat or a Les Paul. He’s free to choose the tool that works best for the music he hears.
For his tone, he runs a Princeton amp at home for recording, and uses the Line 6 Helix — both hardware and software — for a range of sounds live and in the studio. One particular trick he shared: when recording electric guitar, he tunes the third string down slightly to just intonation. The result is an almost visceral rightness to the major third — it hits differently, and once you hear it you can’t unhear it.
On pickup selection, he gravitates toward the neck pickup or the in-between position when playing with distortion. The in-between setting gives him a rounded, chimey quality that sits well in a mix — and his ears, trained across so many instruments and contexts, have learned to feel out the right color for the moment.
The Philosophy: Lean Into What Makes You Different
If there’s a single thread running through everything Jacob said, it’s this: the things that make your approach unusual are not obstacles to overcome — they’re the source of your voice.
Most guitarists, he pointed out, are drawn toward the shapes the guitar naturally offers. Open chords in common keys, pentatonic patterns, the classic sounds associated with the instrument’s history. And that’s a completely natural impulse — we want to recreate the things we love.
But Jacob’s most interesting results have always come from resisting that pull. From asking what the guitar can do that he hasn’t heard yet.
He also spoke about the value of going for things you can’t quite do. Stumbling around at the edge of your ability, he said, is where identity gets built. You aim for something impossible, and in the fumbling you find something else — something that becomes yours. The audience feels that edge too. There’s something magnetic about watching someone reach for something they haven’t quite got yet.
And certainty, for Jacob, is actually a warning sign. The moment he feels completely sure of something is the moment he starts to get uncomfortable. Being open, being uncertain, staying curious — that’s the state he’s always trying to get back to.
The Takeaway
Jacob Collier is not a guitar player in the traditional sense, and he’d be the first to tell you that. But what he’s built on this instrument — this custom-tuned, five-string, entirely personal voice — is something I find genuinely inspiring.
He reminds me that the guitar doesn’t have to be learned the way it’s always been learned. That the standard tuning, the standard shapes, the standard approach — all of it is a starting point, not a destination. And that sometimes the most interesting route into the instrument is the one nobody else has taken.
His latest album, Djesse Vol. 4, is out now — and it features more guitar than anything he’s recorded before. With contributions from John Mayer, Steve Vai, Madison Cunningham, and Chris Martin (singing, not playing), it’s a record that shows exactly what happens when someone approaches the guitar entirely on their own terms.
Go listen to it. And then maybe rethink your own tuning.
