guitar, and facilitate the playing of harp-like arpeggios: This sound, resembling a runaway stream of pure fifths, was discovered by Sychra. Performance practice The Russian guitar is traditionally played without a pick, using fingers for either strumming or picking. The open G tuning allows major chords to be played with only one finger of the fretting hand (the left hand for right-handed guitars), as barre chords. The A-major chord can be played most easily as a barré on the second fret, the B major as a barré on the fourth, C major on the fifth, D major on the seventh, and so on (although other, more involved major shapes are employed as well for a variation in voicing). A fair amount of open-G chord shapes use six or five strings, and so these shapes require the player to mute or not play particular strings. Perhaps the most audible difference between the Spanish and Russian tunings is in the ability to play chords with a tighter, more piano-like voicing on the latter. For example, an E-minor chord on a Spanish guitar (as 022000) is usually played in the order, from low to high, of E (root), B (fifth), E (root), G (minor third), B (fifth) and again E (root). On a Russian guitar it is possible to play the E minor (2002002) as E (root), G (minor third), B (fifth), E (root), G (minor third), B (fifth), and E (root) — or to play it with the same voicing as the six string E minor (using 99X9989). This tighter voicing is particularly audible with seventh chords, including the rootless seventh chord (seventh chords without a root note, actually a diminished chord). It is fairly common for Russian guitar players (particularly those accompanying themselves singing, such as bards) to bring the tuning up or down several steps as desired, either to accommodate the voice or for varying string tension. Vladimir Vysotsky often tuned down a whole step, sometimes even a step and a half to an open E. Also, variations in the open G tuning were fairly common, e.g., Bulat Okudzhava would use the tuning of to play songs written in C, while bard Sergey Nikitin tuned his guitar to an open G minor: . There are more than 1,000 different chords possible for the standard open G tuning and plenty of different schools for left hand (vibrato) and right hand (fingerstyle