How to Start Playing Slide Guitar
Slide guitar is a great style of playing, and it’s a lot of fun, but it can be a pretty difficult style of playing to start with.
In this lesson you’re going to learn 6 tips to help get you started with your slide guitar journey.
All the examples in this lesson are in Open G tuning.
Setting Up Your Guitar for Slide
There are a few simple, basic principles for setting your guitar up ready for slide playing.
To get the best, clearest slide tone, it’s useful to have a slightly higher than usual string action. Many players will have a guitar that is dedicated to slide playing.
If you want to be able to play slide and normal licks on your guitar, a good compromise could be to measure the action at 2mm at the 12th fret. This should be low enough that you can still play, but high enough that you can play slide.
Some players will raise the nut to add some extra height to the strings on a dedicated slide guitar.
It’s also useful to use a higher gauge string. This helps the string stay under tension as the slide is resting on it.
Choosing a Slide
Slides come in many sizes and materials.
Materials range from plastic and glass to metal and ceramic, each with it’s own unique tonal characteristic. Metal slides are often brighter in tone and ceramic slides offer a darker, warmer tone.
When it comes to size, you can get different lengths and thicknesses. It’s advisable to head down to your local music store and try a few out and see what feels best.
Technique of Slide
One of the hardest things to master with slide guitar is the technique of playing a note. When you play on a fretted instrument, you press down behind the fret line and the contact of the string with the fret is what creates the note you hear.
When it comes to playing slide, because you aren’t physically pushing down on the string, you will need to position the slide perfectly above the fretwire to get the note perfectly intonated. If you hover the slide over where your fretting finger would usually be, the note will be flat. Check out the video attached to this lesson for the best practise on this.
Scales
If you want to develop some slide lead skills, you’ll need to remap your pentatonic scales. This is the G Minor Pentatonic scale re-mapped for the Open G tuning. You can play this fretted or with a slide. When you get to the B string, you can either play the 6th fret on the B or skip straight to the 3rd on the high D. This is the same pitch.
You’ll notice that this note is written both ways in the ascending and descending versions.
Vibrato
When fretting normally, vibrato is applied by small string bends up and down. As you aren’t applying pressure with a slide, you will need to move the slide side to side around the peak of the fretwire. This back and forth motion increases and decreases the pitch giving you a smooth vibrato sound.
Spend a little time training your ear on this, it’s tricky to return to that intonated point after moving away each time.
Major Chords
As you learnt in the Introduction to Open G video lesson, you can play major chords with a single finger in Open G tuning. This means you can put together a simple procession using a G, Bb and C chord like this:
With the notes and chords being stacked this way, you can also play this same riff with a slide which gives a cool bluesy feel:
As you get more comfortable, you can start to arpeggiate and single out specific notes and melodic lines within the chord:
