Slide Guitar Part Two
The Basics by Phil Gates



Ok, so last month we covered the basic mechanics of slide guitar, and I’d like to review the important parts:

1. When it comes to the slide, be sure not to press on the strings with the slide. Remember, it’s now your moving fret. No need to press on the strings like traditional playing.
2. For pitch, make sure that you place the center of the slide directly over the fret wire of the note you’re trying to play. If you want to play an “E” note at the 12th fret, place the slide directly over the 12th fret. Not in-between the 11th and 12th frets like fretting a note with your hand.
3. Keep in mind that you don’t have to use the whole slide all of the time. You can just use what’s needed. If you’re only playing slide on the top two strings, only place the slide over those two strings. This will help keep extraneous noises, and notes that you don’t want to hear from sounding. It also helps when finger picking and playing the bass notes with your thumb of the picking hand, and slide with the fingers.
4. Use your right hand for damping techniques. I tend to use the fleshy part of my picking hand as a damper for the lower strings, and individual fingers for the higher strings. Even when using a pick, this can be a nice way to keep out unwanted notes or sounds. Sometimes you want it to be sloppy for that sound, but when you need it clean, this is the way.

Now let’s go to the realm of slide solos:

Soloing on slide guitar is so very expressive. Every nuance of the performance can be tweaked for maximum feeling and emotion. One way to do this is the use of vibrato, which when using the slide consists of rocking the slide in and out of pitch. This can be very subtle, or very dramatic depending on how far you go away from the original pitch.

Take a listen to the use of vibrato:

Example 1

This tends to give the note a very soulful feeling to the note, rather than just landing on the note with no vibrato.

Where and what notes to play when using a slide for me are simple. In a regular tuning, the “Blues scale” or Minor Pentatonic Scales come to mind. If you’re already playing Blues, you’re probably pretty used to these scales already. Now you can just apply the slide.

It has a little different feel at first, having to move to the notes right on top of the frets. For most beginning slide players, intonation is the biggest problem. Before on guitar, if the guitar itself was in tune, we could pretty much press on a fret and play a note in tune (finger pressure vibrato like violinists use excluded). Now, you can really sound bad if you’re not playing with the slide directly over the fret wire. I know I keep harping on this, but it’s that important.

A great exercise for slide guitar is to play the Blues Scale, only with the slide for every note. This will teach you to dampen the top strings when playing low notes and dampening the low strings when playing the upper strings. Play the scale all the way up the neck. Let’s say you’re playing a “G” Blues Scale 1st position on the 3rd fret. Play the scales all the way up to 1st position on the 15th fret. It may seem tedious, but it’s the same way we learned the Blues Scales in the first place, right?

When you’ve done that a few times, try different variations. For instance, slide into each note from a half step down, or from a half step above the note, then resting on the note with vibrato. It’s not a speed drill, it’s a feel drill. Take your time.

Open tunings

Often in slide guitar players use open tunings; an open tuning is the process of tuning the guitar to the notes of a chord. Two common open tunings are “D” or “G”. When you strum the guitar unfretted, it plays a chord. For the example here, I used an open “D” tuning. This now means that I have gone from a tuning of E-A-D-G-B-E to D-G-D-G-B-D.

When you tune to an open chord, just resting the slide across all of the strings makes a chord. Take a listen:

Example open 1b

Then you can combine single note playing with the chord playing, keeping in mind the positions of the notes of the Blues scale have moved some.

Take a listen:

Example 2b

So combining this, and keeping in mind the I-IV-V Blues progression, can open up worlds of playing.

Here’s a quick slide solo with a band.

Example 3

Next month we’re going to go further with this by adding bass notes while playing slide, and other cool slide techniques. Be sure to try many different methods with your slide guitar playing. This will help you create your own sound.

Have Fun!


Phil Gates
http://www.philgates.com
http://www.myspace.com/philgatesmusic