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Slide Guitar Lesson

Slide guitar, which first found it’s origins in blues, has had a profound impact on rock music. Slide guitar players like Duane Allman, Ron Wood, John Fogerty, and others carved out their own playing styles with the steel slide (sometimes called a bottleneck-the first slides were fashioned out of wine bottles).

 

Intro to Slide Guitar

When playing slide guitar, the string is not pushed down on the fret. The slide lightly pushes the string directly over the desired guitar fret (as opposed to playing next to the fret with your finger). Playing in tune with the slide takes quite a bit of practice. The same holds true when it comes to getting the strings to ring properly. You don’t want the strings to rattle or buzz against the slide.
Playing slide guitar requires new right and left hand techniques that will seem awkward at first. Here are some rules of thumb (heh heh):

Left hand

1. Which finger?? - You first need to decide which finger will hold the slide. Choose from the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th finger. The decision will be based on two factors: which finger feels most comfortable and the need to use the other free fingers for fretting notes. Duane Allman put the slide on his ring finger. This way he could use his 2nd and 3rd finger to play fretted notes while the slide was on his finger.

2. 2nd finger muting - Most of the time the 2nd finger should lay flat behind the slide. This will provide muting of unwanted guitar strings.

Right Hand

1. Fingers or Pick? - Most serious country slide guitar players use the right fingers when playing slide. The benefit of this is the ability to mute unwanted strings. The drawback is that you can’t use the pick! The thumb and index finger work well for finger picking slide guitar. I recommend using the fingers.
There are also many rock or blues slide guitar players that use the pick. They do a lot of muting with the palm of the right hand and the left hand 2nd finger.

Slide Guitar Exercises

Keep these rules in mind:

1. Move the entire left hand.
2. Play each exercise on the same frets on every string.
3. Mute unwanted strings with 1st finger of left hand.
4. Mute unwanted strings with free fingers or palm of right hand.
5. Play each exercise slowly

Slide Ex. 1 (HEAR IT!)	Slide Ex. 2 (HEAR IT!)

Double Note Slide 1 (HEAR IT!)	Double Note Slide 2 (HEAR IT!)

Some Slide Guitar On Your Own

Now that you know the basics of playing slide guitar, there are 100's of new things to work on that will help your slide playing. Here are some ideas:

1. The slide exercises in this lesson are 2-fret slides (you move the slide 2 frets in either direction). Try 3-fret Slides, 4-fret slides, etc..
2. Try 3-fret, 4-fret, slides with double notes.
3. Try sliding 3 strings at a time.
4. Switch to Open-G tuning and try exercise #1, #2, #3