Guitar How-To

Slide guitar is a facet of guitar playing that looks very sexy and sounds good with very little effort. In the early 1900′s dangerous looking dudes apparently loved to produce a wailing effect from their guitars by running a knife blade along the strings with their left hands instead of fretting the strings with their fingers. Some really outrageously dangerous dudes would break the neck off a bottle and slip it on their third or fourth fingers. If they were not careful how they placed the jagged end of the bottleneck, the guitar strings were not the only things doing the wailing.

One of the old-time bottleneck guitar players was Sylvester Weaver who in 1923 recorded a tune called “Guitar Rag”. Some years later Bob Willis And The Texas Playboys recorded the piece under the name “Steel Guitar Rag” which became a staple in the country music repertoire. Weaver’s version of the song was played on a guitjo – a guitar with a banjo sound, or a banjo with a guitar neck – and was the first recording of slide guitar playing. In the late nineteen sixties Duane Allman began playing slide guitar using a medicine bottle on his ring finger.

Anyhow, that’s how slide guitar started. So basically, instead of playing chords, you accompanied your blues song with a solo played by sliding your slide up and down the strings. If you wear your slide on your pinky you can lift it away from the strings so you can use your other fingers to fret chords between slide solos.

Slides for guitar playing are available at your local music store in metal which has strident sound or glass which is smoother. If you want people to think of use as really bluesy and old-timey, use a lipstick holder as a slide.

It is found by many slide guitarists to be a good idea to use open tunings for slide guitar. In case you do not know, an open tuning is where your guitar is tuned to sound a chord. Here are some of the more common open tunings used by slide guitar players:

Open D: d a d f# a d
Open G: d g d g b d
Open E: e b e g# b e
Open A: e a c# e a e OR e a e a c# e

When you are playing slide guitar you will need to damp strings as you go so you do not play unwanted notes. You can use the fingers of your left or right hand to do this but developing the technique will be your biggest challenge. Once you have developed some flair with the slide you might want to so some experimenting with some elctronic effects.

To play slide guitar, you place the slide above the fret. One technique you will need to work on for maximum expressiveness is vibrato. You play vibrato by moving the slide up and down the guitar neck in repeated small movements. Practice on long notes with your hand relaxed.

You will probably be wanting to head over to YouTube to check out some slide guitar videos, but I have included one here which gives you a lesson in basic slide guitar in standard tuning.

The guitar was originally an acoustic instrument that was used as a solo instrument or to accompany singers in situations involving small audiences. The popularity of jazz bands featuring a guitar as part of the rhythm section led to efforts by guitar players to be heard above the other instruments.

The result of these efforts was an amplified guitar that did not sound like a loud acoustic guitar – it was a totally different instrument! So the electric guitar’s progress became a story of changes in the way the guitar is played and the way it sounds.

The Gibson company spends lots of money on innovations in guitar technology. An outstanding example is the Robot guitar which takes only ten seconds to tune itself. Now, a new Gibson electric guitar is born. Due out in Decemger, the new guitar looks the same on the outside as the nineteen sixties Firebird X but the inside is about as 2010 as you can get.

Powered by a mobile phone battery, the guitar has built-in effects and sounds numbering in the thousands. The new Firebird never goes out of tune because there is an automatic tuner built right into the neck.

Sounds great but many guitar players are complaining that the new guitar is too expensive and full of features no real, working guitar player would ever want. Also, there are doubts that those of us who will be able to afford the new Gibson will be able to buy parts for it in the future.

And another thing . . . not everybody sees built-in effects as a desirable feature. A lot of guitar players prefer their effects separate from the guitar so that they can change them.

More info on the electric guitar can be found in the first of my free PDF articles on the guitar called Learn How To Play The Electric Guitar.