Slide Guitar Lessons
Slide guitar lessons
help you re-orient yourself to
an entirely different approach to playing the guitar. It is so different replacing all the left hand
fingering that you know with a brass or glass slide on one of your left hand fingers, and even that choice of
where to put the slide has consequences. Because you’ll need at least one finger to dampen the resonance
behind the slide, you can place the slide on your second, third, or fourth finger, and the one you choose
will go a long way towards determining whether you’ll be playing a hybrid style of fretting notes in some
passages, and using the slide in others. Because the slide is a straight shot across one fret, it is
imperative to either know the fretboard incredibly well and see segments where fragmented chords intersect or
to become an expert in open "E" or open "G" tuning, or even some other custom tunings. It is also mandatory that you learn appropriate damping and blocking
techniques.
One of the most important considerations
in any discussion of slide guitar playing is the orientation of the instrument to your body, so when we use
the phrase “slide guitar” we are holding the guitar like a regular guitar and putting a slide on a left hand
finger. When we look at all the aspects of the fretboard and where notes and chords originate, we use
virtually the same information to play dobro or lap steel with the distinction that those instruments are held
in a transverse or horizontal manner and instead of wearing a slide, the player holds a “steel’ in their left
hand. For the purpose of slide guitar lessons, we are talking about wearing a slide on a finger and playing a
conventional electric or acoustic guitar.
How the notes ring together is one of the most attractive elements of this
type of guitar playing, and it requires tremendous fretboard knowledge including the ability to expand that
fretboard knowledge to understand the landscape when multiple strings are tuned to different pitches. The use of
open tunings helps to create pre-formatted chord groups in open string clusters, making it that much easier to grab
the notes for the sound you want.
Over time you will gain a great deal of experience as to how you want your slide playing to
sound, and a large part of that is in dealing with different resonances that are developed from the composition of
the slide. Different materials create different sounds, as do the density of the material which is usually
expressed in terms of wall thickness. So there are audible differences between thin and thick walled glass slides,
thin and thick wall brass slides, thin and thick wall ceramic slides, etc.
Don’t kid yourself on this one. There are several demanding techniques you must master to make
this style of playing sound good. Don’t just think you put a slide on a finger and you’re off to the races. Slide
guitar lessons will help equip you with everything you must know to play this style well, and the great thing about
these techniques, is that they work on any guitar with steel strings. That means you can use this with both
electric and acoustic guitar playing. Learn how to be the best slide guitar player possible with
slide guitar
lessons from the Guitar Lesson
Expert.
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