Hello,
Nice place you got here!
My name is John and I've been playing guitar for 33 years (maybe a bit longer but that's when I bought my first guitar; a Teisco Del Ray electric). Roughly the same time as I bought my first guitar, I bought a couple of live albums which had a profound effect on me: Johnny Winter And Live, and The Allman Brothers Live at the Fillmore East. I fell in love with
slide in addition to standard electric guitar. I especially liked the very aggressive electric slide players like Johnny, Larry "Rhino" Rheinhardt, Duane and Dickey. I started trying to play electric slide fairly early on while I was learning the guitar.
I mainly played electric guitar with a flat pick; sometimes acoustic with a pick. I tried to play slide with a pick as well, using the slide on my little finger.
As I got better at playing the guitar, my slide guitar didn't improve as much as my standard playing. I found myself playing less and less slide as it was painful to listen to. I've always practiced a lot and my musical interests expanded greatly as the years passed, and I would always find myself coming back to slide.
In the past twenty years or so, I've found myself more intersted in both acoustic slide (especially Delta style) and the slower more "greasy" slide playing I associate with Lowell George, Bonnie Raitt and Ry Cooder. I really love that very slow vibrato, but I'm still interested in that nasty aggressive style too. I'm now trying to play a lot more slide with my fingers (no picks or fingerpicks).
In the past few years I've been making a more concerted effort to learn some of the more difficult styles of guitar that have interested me. I've been buying books and instructional DVDs to motivate me, and explain more difficult concepts. The areas I've been interested in have been:
Django style gypsy jazz gutiar.
Fingerstyle guitar.
Flamenco guitar.
Jazz comping.
Bottleneck slide guitar. (I just got the Bob Brozman DVDs from Homespun and have already learned a lot from them)
So far I really like the instructional DVD route since I've never been good at reading tabs (I'm better with notation than tabs). It's not as good as a teacher of course, but better than not having anything.
Anyway, it's nice to see all the other sliders around here. I'll be posting soon.
J