Like this lesson? The downloadable version includes extra files, making it much easier to learn.
More details here
Refresh the page to watch the movie again.
The movies in the paid downloadable versions of these lessons come in Windows Media Video format with all the Start-Stop-Pause buttons.
|
Slide guitar, to me anyway, is the most fun and most free way to extract sounds from a guitar. It's also one of the trickiest and requires a whole lot of playing to come to grips with the many speed bumps that get in the way of doing it cleanly. Traditionally, the main way to facilitate playing
slide is to tune your guitar to an open tuning ... in other words, tune your open strings to a chord. By doing that, you can use the slide (which of course can only be applied straight across the strings) to get that same chord further up the neck. I dabbled myself for a long time with open tunings, but I found them to more confusing than anything else. I decided to revert to standard, and to my delight, found that there are dozens of ways of expressing all flavors of chords with no need to re-learn the layout of the fretboard.
I'm in the middle of putting together a whole DVD on playing slide in Standard tuning, so I decided to do a quick lesson for GfB this week to give you a taste of what can be done. I picked a boogie feel and played it on the Stratocaster. I went through my Digitech RP100 for the overdriven sound, I'm in standard tuning and I'm using a heavy slide. I'm assuming you have a slide ... if you don't, buy one. I guarantee you won't regret it. There are many types ... brass, glass, chrome, stainless steel, real bottlenecks ... I use a short brass model I have made for me and which are available from this site. Wear it on your pinky, is my advice.
The piece is a sort of standard boogie feel, based on triplets, in A ... it's a 12 bar, so it's basically A to D to E, but you'll see that there are some details added to the chord structure, some extra chords:
| A - - - | A - C D | A - - - | A - C D | D - - - | D - F G |
| A - - - | A - C D | E - - - | E - D C | A - - - | A - - -|
So it's a I-IV-V progression with those other chords thrown in. Some of these are 'outside the key' chords (the C, F and G) but they're a sort of standard way of deviating, as I'm sure you can hear. As I often point out in these lessons, there is no need whatsoever to stick to 'related chords' when composing music, in fact it's the deviations from the norm that give a piece it's identity. Music would be pretty boring if it was all written around the related chord structure of the key. To write it all out in Roman numerals is probably more confusing than anything else but here it is anyway:
| I - - - | I - bIII IV | I - - - | I - bIII IV| IV - - - | IV - bVI bVII|
| I - - - | I - bIII IV | V - - - | V - IV CbIII | I - - - | I - - - |
The most important aspect of playing slide in standard is the muting that's going on with the picking hand. You can see in the movie that my thumb and fingertips are deadening all strings that aren't being played. It's imperative to do this, otherwise you're going to be hearing all kinds of stray notes ringing out that happen to be underneath the slide. It can be be an awful sound. In this tune, the slide deals with the 2nd-3rd-4th strings as a unit, grabbing each time a major triad, so it's not all that tricky to accomplish. The thumb firmly lays itself on the two bass strings while the ring finger mutes the treble string. As you have already noticed, this piece uses both normal and slide techniques rolled into one. It's something I like to do because the normal notes are perfectly in tune, since they are fretted. Even if some of the slide is a little off pitch (which is easy to do), by returning to normal, fretted, notes, the ear gets a reconfirmation of where the pitch really is. Switching between the two is the tricky bit ... it takes a deft touch to bring the slide into contact with the strings and then move off again, but like everything else to do with learning guitar, practice is the key.
I've indicated in the tablature which sections are slide ... they have an orange box around them. Rarely do I use more than two fingers at a time in any of this, so you're not going to find any difficult positions; it's the transitioning between the two techniques that's hard, and getting the slide bits in tune, especially that big move to the 10th and 12th frets.
Have fun with it, you can play this on acoustic as well. Take it slowly and correct all mistakes before they become engrained.
Full speed midi | Half speed midi | GuitarPro file | Mp3
Click here to discuss this lesson
Like this lesson? The downloadable version includes extra files, making it much easier to learn.
More details here
Be sure to check out our Lesson Value Packs... and save yourself a heap of $$$
