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Originally Posted by schermerberger
thanks for all the comments; after a few more days of fiddling with it the comfort has set in a bit for the behind the slide muting. And after hearing all the slide bits from you all, I realize the right hand muting is where its at to get a clean sing songy sound.
Control seems to be the name of the game. Just the right touch of vibrato, string isolation muting, it's not an easy bit in standard or drop D tuning.
At this point I haven't modified my guitar set up to taylor to slide playing. so with the thick walled pyrex, typically low action w/ 11's on it I don't have the breathing room to press too hard on the 1st & 6th w/o buzzing the fret. But my endeavor is fun. |
The worst culprit is likely to be your high E string. If you are not planning on any manly Albert King 3 step bends, you might consider bumping up a guage or two on the high E.
12, 13, or even 14 can handle the tension and won't fret out.
FWIW, while it's invaluable to achieve good right hand muting of adjacent strings to isolate the target note, the right hand will never be able to cancel out oppositional harmonic overtones from behind the slide on the note(s) that are permitted to sound. The only way to control that is with some amount of light damping behind the slide.
The guy who really taught me how to play slide called the three fingers that lay across the strings behind the slide a 'paddle'. Throughout our first few lessons, whenever he heard those oppositional overtones, or caught us with our damping fingers off the strings he would call out 'Put your Paddle down!" Its a very good habit to teach to a beginner, but hard to embrace consistently if you didn't start out playing slide that way. Its easier to instill good technique to a 'clean slate' than to erase bad habits that have been ingrained for a long time.
'Keep your paddle down' is still good advice for any level of player, unless you are going to use oppositional overtones as a part of your 'style'. But that should be a conscious decision, not a by-product of sloppy technique.