The 5-string guitar and DAEAD tuning, explained: Jacob Collier's symmetrical system

The first thing you notice about Jacob Collier's guitar is that something is gone. There are five strings where there should be six. It is not a damaged instrument or a bass crossover. It is a deliberate design, built around a tuning Collier spent years dreaming about before any company would make it for him, and it has quietly become one of the most asked-about ideas in acoustic guitar.

The tuning is called DAEAD, after its five notes. Collier has put it on a line of signature Taylor guitars, the most accessible of which arrived in late 2025, and he committed to it hard enough to record an entire acoustic album in the tuning, by his own account in just four days (MusicRadar). For a strings site, this is the fun kind of story, because the instrument is mostly normal. The radical part is the tuning, and the tuning is free.

Read the name low to high and you have the tuning: D, A, E, A, D. Five strings, five notes, and the lowest one is a D, the same note you already reach for in Drop D. The range from the bottom D to the top D lands close to a normal guitar, so DAEAD is not a baritone or a high-strung oddity. It sits right where you expect a guitar to sit. The strangeness is in the spacing between the strings, not the overall pitch.

Look at the notes again and you see the trick. The middle string is E. On either side of it sits an A. Outside those sit the two D strings. The tuning is a mirror, folded around that central E (Guitar World). The bottom half and the top half are reflections of each other, which is the single fact that explains why Collier built it and why it plays the way it does.

Collier has been open that the standard six-string never mapped onto how he hears music. His first instrument was a four-string tenor tuned in fifths, and the guitar's stack of fourths felt like a maze (Guitar World). So he designed his way out. He asked Taylor, in his words, how they would feel about putting five strings on a six-string neck, tuned in a strange way, with the same range as a normal guitar but a different set of intervals (Guitar.com).

The intervals are the genius part. From the low D up to the middle E, the strings move in fifths. From that E up to the high D, they move in fourths. Fifths are wide and droning, the sound of a fiddle or an open power chord. Fourths are the familiar melodic spacing most of the guitar already uses. DAEAD gives you both in one instrument. And because the two lowest strings can ring as an open D-and-A drone, every chord you build above them arrives with a built-in richness, a ninth baked into the harmony before you have done anything clever.

The mirror does the rest. Learn a voicing on the bottom three strings and its reflection is waiting on the top three. That symmetry turns inversions and reharmonizations, the things Collier is famous for, into a physical move on the neck rather than a theory problem. It is a tuning designed by someone who thinks in shapes and wanted the fretboard to think the same way.

Here is the part the gear coverage tends to skip. DAEAD is a tuning, and a tuning costs nothing. You can hear the entire idea on the acoustic sitting in your house right now.

Take your bottom five strings and tune them to D, A, E, A, D. Then either leave the sixth string slack and ignore it, or take it off entirely, exactly the way Keith Richards pulls a string for his five-string open G. You will not get the perfectly balanced feel of a neck designed for five strings, and your string spacing will be a touch off, but the intervals, the symmetry, and the drone are all genuinely there. That is enough to know within an evening whether this way of thinking suits you. If it does, the purpose-built instrument starts to make sense. If it does not, you have spent nothing but a restring.

This is the same lesson as every alternate tuning we cover. The instrument matters less than people think. The tuning is where the new sound actually lives, which is why our open D and Drop D guides exist: small changes to the strings you already have, opening doors a new guitar never would.

Because DAEAD lives in normal guitar range, you do not need a special set. A standard phosphor bronze acoustic set covers it. Phosphor bronze is the default acoustic alloy because it is warm, balanced, and long-lived, and it suits the drone-heavy chords DAEAD encourages.

For most players, a light .012 to .053 set is the right starting point. The D'Addario EJ16 is the workhorse here, the most-played acoustic set there is, and it handles the low D comfortably without fighting your hand.

If you want the longest tone life, a coated phosphor bronze set such as Elixir Nanoweb lasts several times longer for the player who experiments with tunings and hates how fast retuning wears a set in. Whatever you choose, browse the full acoustic shelf on our brand-by-brand catalog and pick the gauge that matches how hard you play, not the marketing on the box.

Once the tuning hooks you, a guitar built for it is a different experience, because the neck and string spacing are designed around five strings instead of borrowed from six. Collier's signature line has three models, all of them shipping in DAEAD (Taylor Guitars).

The original signature model is the premium one, a Grand Concert built with solid Hawaiian koa. The two newer models, which arrived in late 2025, exist to make the format affordable: the Academy 22e 5-String, with a solid walnut top and a compact Grand Concert body on a 24-7/8 inch scale, and the GS Mini 5-String, a solid torrefied spruce top in Taylor's small travel size (Guitar.com). The Academy and the GS Mini are the on-ramp, priced to let a curious player commit without flagship money. Check Taylor for current pricing and availability.

We are not linking a buy button for the guitars themselves, because we only point you to gear we have verified, and a signature acoustic is a try-before-you-buy instrument anyway. The strings are the part we can put in your hands today, and they are all you need to start. The guitar can wait until the tuning has earned it.