I’ve had a lot of incredible musicians come through my studio, but Madison Cunningham is one of those players who stops you dead in your tracks. Before we’d even properly started our conversation, she was playing — and I already had goosebumps.
Madison is a Grammy-winning singer-songwriter whose guitar playing is as distinctive as her voice. On her latest record Ace, she pushed her already unconventional approach even further, building an entire album around a single open tuning she discovered during a blizzard.
Today, she walked me through that tuning, her hybrid picking technique, her songwriting process, and the story behind one of the most interesting guitars I’ve ever seen up close.
Starting Young: Guitar and Singing at the Same Time
Madison started singing and playing around the same age — four or five years old — and was already feeling confident in her rhythm hand by the time she was seven. Her dad played a big jumbo Taylor, and she’d put it on her lap as a toddler and try to make it work.
That early investment in rhythm wasn’t accidental. Growing up in a specific musical environment, she noticed that female guitarists often weren’t given the same time or expectations to develop their playing.
Her response as a kid was quietly determined: she spent years from age seven to ten locking down a strong rhythmic foundation — and it shows. Her sense of time and feel is rock solid.
She later transitioned to fingerpicking in her early teens, and that’s where her playing really began to develop its own character.
The Open Tuning: C G D F A C (Down to B)
If you’ve watched Madison play live and wondered what on earth is going on with her guitar, this is your answer.
The base tuning she developed is C G D F A C — and every song on Ace was written in it. She discovered it during a blizzard, stuck in the house and determined to find something new. It didn’t come easily at first.
“I was bothered. I was upset because I couldn’t figure out how to make it sing or work. And then I found those little voicings.”
Once it clicked, it never stopped. The whole record followed.
For the song Break the Jaw, she lowered everything by a half step to B, purely for her voice. She stuck with that and used a capo when needed. On the day we spoke, the tuning was sitting at B on a standard-gauge string set — no special strings required. You just need to play more gently, because the lower tension makes the guitar a little “jangly” if you dig in hard.
The magic of this tuning is how it opens up rich, dense chord voicings with minimal finger movement. Where a guitarist in standard tuning might need to stretch across five or six frets to build a complex chord, Madison can get something lush and full with just two or three fingers. It’s not musical theory driving these choices, either — it’s pure instinct and discovery.
“The ignorance is such a co-writer in the whole thing.”
That’s one of my favorite things she said. The unfamiliarity of the tuning forces her to find things she’d never have reached for deliberately.
Tuning Steers the Song
This is something I think a lot of players underestimate. Madison is clear that without this tuning, Ace would be a completely different record — not just sonically, but compositionally.
The voicings themselves suggest where a song should go. She described it like an author who doesn’t know who’s knocking at the door until the door opens — she wants to be surprised by her own music. The tuning creates that possibility because nothing is predetermined. Everything is, in a sense, a happy accident until it isn’t.
Standard tuning, by contrast, comes loaded with muscle memory. You already know what chord comes next. Open or alternative tunings strip that away and force genuine discovery.
Hybrid Picking: Flesh Over Nails
Madison’s right-hand technique is unusual — and in the best possible way. It’s a hybrid approach that draws from Travis picking but doesn’t stay there. She uses a Jim Dunlop 1mm black pick for attack when she wants it, but seamlessly moves in and out of fingerpicking throughout a song.
Because she has no nails, she plays with the flesh of her thumb and the pads of her index and middle fingers. The result is a tone that’s rounder and warmer than nail picking, but still articulate. When she demonstrated a picking pattern slowly, it actually sounded more complex than when played up to speed — the individual voices opened up in a way that the momentum of full tempo conceals.
She described the difference between pick and fingers as a matter of body — the fingers push the low end in a way the pick doesn’t. It’s not better or worse, just a different flavor. Depending on how hard she plays and which part of a song she’s in, she moves between the two almost unconsciously.
The Guitar as a Conversation Partner
One of the most thoughtful things Madison talked about was the relationship between the guitar and the voice — and the idea of not filling space.
For her song Wake, the subject matter is heavy and wordy. So she pulls the guitar back, letting the lyrics breathe, and only plays between vocal phrases. The guitar responds to the voice rather than competing with it. She called it a conversation, and said it’s a big part of what makes her feel not alone on stage.
“There’s something else that speaks in between the vocal phrase and the next vocal phrase.”
This is something a lot of guitarists — myself included — struggle with. The temptation when you’re nervous or feeling exposed is to play more, to put up an impressive shield.
Madison compares it to hitting a kick drum as hard as you can to get the biggest sound: the softest touch always makes the whole thing bloom. She’s failed at this plenty of times, she says, but it’s the principle she comes back to.
The Silver Tone Guitar: Rubber Bridge, Flat Wounds, and All Darkness
Halfway through our conversation, Madison picked up a guitar unlike anything in most collections: a Silver Tone Guitar Pro from the 1960s, fitted with flat wound strings and a rubber bridge.
The rubber bridge guitar had a big moment in LA a number of years ago — largely started by Blake Mills and the work of Ruben at Old Style Guitar Shop, who began producing them in small batches around 2020. Madison borrowed this one from her friend and producer Tyler during lockdown while writing. He eventually told her it had chosen her, and she’s been traveling with it ever since.
Plugged in, the sound is unlike anything else: all muffled low end, darkness stacked on darkness, with that bright, cutting voice sitting on top of it. The contrast between the warmth of the guitar and the brightness of Madison’s vocal is striking in a way that wouldn’t work with most other instruments.
She tunes this one to C standard — essentially a half step above baritone — with the same flatwound strings that came with it. Short scale, low tension, maximum darkness.
Songwriting: Timers, Surprises, and Recovering from Perfectionism
Madison writes with a timer. Not for the whole day — just a defined chunk, usually 60 minutes. Everything shuts off for that period. No pressure beyond the window.
The catch? She usually gets hooked. Something happens in those 60 minutes that pulls her deeper, but she makes herself stop anyway — so she’s excited to climb back in, the same way you’re more excited to watch a show when you can’t binge it all at once.
She’s a self-described recovering perfectionist who is now actively chasing sloppiness. Neil Young is one of her favorite guitarists, and what she loves about him is the sloppy swagger — the feeling and personality in every note, the simplicity that somehow moves her more than technical precision ever could.
“The value system changes as you try to get better and deeper at an instrument.”
She’s made peace with not being “the best” guitar player. That liberation, she said, created room for everything she actually cares about — the songs, the story, the feeling.
On Storytelling vs. Technique
The closing idea in our conversation is one I keep coming back to: everyone is good at guitar now. The bar for technical skill has never been higher. But the musicians who resonate are the ones telling stories.
Impressive melodies without direction or purpose become irrelevant quickly. The surprise has to live inside the song’s story, not just in the chord choices. And if you’re chasing surprise as an end in itself, audiences will get fatigued.
That’s Madison’s whole philosophy in a sentence: the guitar serves the song, the song serves the story, and the story is always the point.
Madison Cunningham’s latest record Ace is out now. If you haven’t heard it yet, start there — but honestly, you can’t go wrong with any of her records.
