Ionian tuning question
General mountain dulcimer or music discussions
@RoyB, when I first picked up the dulcimer, I found discussions about modal tunings to be confusing and maddening. I had a reasonable (though certainly not expert) understanding of music theory but it made no sense to me. And today, I usually leave discussions about modes to others. I only joined here because your initial question was about an open chord tuning and not really about modes per se.
Why do I find the concept of modal tuning so confusing? A given tuning is only limited to a single mode if you 1) have no extra frets; and 2) only play the melody on the melody string. And even then, many folks songs are based on pentatonic (5-note scales) rather than modes, so they still don't correspond to the mode that gives a tuning its name.
Similarly, I found the concept of "reverse" tunings to be wholly unnecessary and confusing. But the logic is not complicated.
In the traditional style of drone play, the drones must be the first and fifth notes of the scale. That is why when we tune to the key of D, our bass and middle strings are always D and A respectively, and when we retune, we only change the melody string. Similarly, in the key of C, the drones must be C and G.
But what if you wanted to play in the key of G? Your drones would be G and D. On a standard dulcimer, it would be really hard to tune your bass string to G. It would either be too floppy to make any noise or you'd break it tuning up. But what if you switched the order of the drones? You could easily keep your bass string tuned to D and tune your middle string down from A to G. Then you tune your melody string to d (an octave above the bass) and instead of a normal GDD tuning, you have a "reversed" DGd tuning.
That's all it is. A "reverse" tuning just means the drones are reversed. It's that simple.