In a previous lesson we had a look at the basic techniques of playing slide guitar on the acoustic. Today I would like to dig into this style of playing a little deeper by looking at some blues slide guitar.
A lot of slide guitar playing is done in open tunings as it allows you to execute chords with a straight bar. This is very useful when using a slide as you can play your bar chords within a single fret.
However, in this lesson I want to show you how to approach blues on your guitar with a slide in a standard tuning. While there are some limitations playing this way, it still sounds great and is convenient, as you don’t need to alter your tuning every time you want to play slide guitar.
Intro To Slide Guitar
This is a root 5 bar chord shape in the positions for G, C, and D, and it is going to form the basis of a little slide guitar blues piece that we are going to play in the key of G.
The notes that I have highlighted in red form the shape you will target with your slide. These notes are going to be easy to play with your slide because they all fall within the one fret.
Here is this shape laid out across a 12 bar blues in G. This is very important for you to play as it will be the foundation on which we will build our slide blues piece. It will help you visualize where this shape needs to be at any given point within our blues in G:
Slide Guitar Lesson: Blues Scale In Open E Tuning
Remember that when playing slide guitar on your acoustic you need to place the slide directly over the fret you are targeting. Also, keep in mind all the things we spoke of with slide guitar technique in an earlier lesson on this topic.
In the example above I am targeting the top two strings of our shape at the 12th fret. Remember that the slide needs to play directly over the fret, not between them. Therefore I start this riff by placing my slide directly over the 11th fret before sliding it up to be directly over the top of the 12th fret.
In the second bar of this slide riff, our shape is moving down chromatically from the 12th to 10th fret. This is a very common move in blues slide guitar playing.
Slide Guitar Licks With Derek Trucks
Notice that in this riff I target our shape at the 3rd fret before finishing up at the 12th. The 3rd fret is also a great place to target this shape to get some very cool sounding blues riffs over the G chord when playing slide on your acoustic.
The great thing about having just one shape to target for our blues slide piece, is that the same riffs we did on G will work for C and D at the 5th and 7th positions respectively. Try it.
Take note that when targeting this shape, as we have throughout for our slide blues, we are not restricting ourselves to only the notes within that shape. There are notes that are played outside too, as is the case for the C and D riffs above.
Why You Should Learn Slide Guitar In Standard Tuning
Always see these “outside” notes in relation to the shape when you play them, as it will help greatly when you want to take these ideas and use them in other musical situations.
Finally, lets take these ideas and create our slide blues piece in G. Listen to it and compare it back to the beginning of the lesson when we were just targeting the shape for each chord with the slide:
Work your way through this slowly. Isolate each riff so you can really get it down and always listen carefully to the audio as a reference.
Standard Tuning Slide Guitar Book/online Media: Book With Online Video Lessons
As always check out great players of this style to continue working on your slide guitar playing. Here are a few to get you started:“He gets more of an open, slidey sound. But here’s the way to really tell: He played the Fender, and I played the Gibson. The Fender is a little bit thinner and brighter, a sparkling sound, while the Gibson is just a full-tilt screech.” – Duane Allman on EC’s slide playing, interview “This Boy, Willie Wilson, had a little thing on his finger like a small medicine bottle and he was zinging with it, you know. I said, ‘Jesus! Wonder what’s that he’s playing?’ I knew that guitars hadn’t usually been sounding like that. So I eases up close enough to look, and I see what he has on his finger. ‘Sounds good!’ I said. ‘Jesus! I like that!’ And from there, I got the idea and said, ‘I believe I want to play one of them things.'” – Son House [1]
I’m not really an expert on slide guitar, so the following stuff is just for beginners. Slide guitar is an essential part of the Blues, I had to start with it. Duane Allman’s playing on
. More than any other guitar technique it depends on the right feeling. The basics can be learned within a day, but to master it you need a long time.
Hometraining: Slide Guitar
Most slide guitar instructions start like “and now we use the open xyz tuning”. That means you can forget what you know about the fretboard and forget both your left and right hand techniques. You have to learn everything new. To avoid this, I’ll first explain slide guitar on standard tuning, so all you need is a slide. Open tunings (see below) give a different sound and have their advantages, but they are not better in every case. The late Muddy Waters for example played in standard tuning, also Duane and EC on some songs. Open tuning is often used for Delta Blues on acoustic guitars, because you need the bass strings in correct tuning. For soloing on electric guitars it’s not that important, so you can play in standard tuning. However, you have to damp some strings, which is usually done with the picking hand. That’s why most slide players prefer fingerstyle. Damping is more important in standard tuning, because you get dissonant intervals when the strings with all their overtones ring out.
You can use both acoustic and electric guitars, as long as they don’t have nylon strings. If you want to play much slide guitar, prepare a guitar just for this job. That means using heavier strings (no “super slinky”…) and a high action (distance of the strings to the fretboard). If you have an extra guitar only for slide, you can also try out the open tunings. If you have only one and play sometimes slide or want to switch between slide and normal playing, use the standard tuning.
Resonator guitars (i.e. a Dobro) are great for acoustic slide guitar, they give a loud, metallic “Delta Blues” tone due to the metal cones build in.
Open G Tuning On Guitar
The advantage of slide guitar is that you can play it on old guitars with worn-out fretboards or even cheap guitars with bad adjusted frets. You don’t need the frets!
Slides are usually made of glass or metal. In the early days of Blues the players also used a bone (like Mississippi Fred McDowell, who gave some of his slide guitar secrets to Bonnie Raitt) or a knife. Glass and metal produce a different sound and it’s just a matter of your taste which you prefer. A general rule is that heavier slide create a better sustain.
Another way is to look around in your garage for a piece of tube, walk through a property market and look for heating copper tubes (you can make about 20 slides of 1 meter tube!) or visit a pharmacy and look for those little tablet glass bottles. You can also use the neck of a bottle (another expression for slide guitar is bottleneck guitar). There are lots of things you can use (Duane Allman, Derek Trucks and Rory Gallagher used a glass Coricidin medicine bottle, which unfortunately is no more produced, but you can get replicas!).
Slide Guitar Lesson: Choosing A Slide
Which finger should I use for slide playing? You have the choice between middle finger, ring finger and the pinky. The index finger does not work, because you need a least one finger to mute the other side of the strings. All fingers have advantages and disadvantages.
As mentioned above most slide players use open tunings, especially on acoustic guitars when used for backing. That means all strings are tuned in a way that the open string notes belong two a major (or sometimes a minor) chord. That does not necessarily mean that they are tuned note for note using a chord! Some notes can be left out. The advantage is that with open tunings you can play basic chords using the slide including the bass notes, whereas slide guitar in standard tuning is better for solo guitar.
Scales and chords for most open tunings can be found right here at the scale generator. If you miss a tuning, drop me a note. I strongly recommend to use this tool, especially if you like open tunings. It
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