Okay,
So I am limping along on slide. I mean, jeez, hear a couple of Derek Trucks Band tracks, re-tune my Tele to Open E and all of a sudden I’m Mr. Slide Guy? Hardly. But it doesn’t sound like I am torturing cats in the guitar room and I am finding it fun to play, so that has to count for something.
It’s funny – I found a weird tone thing; not sure if it is just where my head is at right now, or if this is a known slide thing. I play with a variant of Clapton’s Woman Tone – which basically means that I roll the tone all the way off my guitar, in this case for the bridge pickup, not the neck like Slowhand. Slide is so bright that it can take that thick, farty tone and get a clear, bell-like note out of it. I have my amp pretty gained up – what? like you find that surprising? 
– and it just sings.
Well, so I am learning a bit about slides – for instance, it is very easy to become a Slide Slut™. I mean, most are $15 - $30, they come in glass, metal, ceramic, straight, curved, ones that fit your pinky vs. middle, ones that are little rings you can flip around and back out of the way – you name it. Why not own ‘leventy-twelve of them?
Well, I decided I needed a big, heavy as hell, brass or bronze slide. Why? Well I got to try a resonator guitar – you know, the metal kind like the cover of the Dire Straits CD – and the guy handed me just that kind of slide. It was great to use – the tone was thick and more sustaining; I found out with a tad of research on line that “oh, of course you use brass with an acoustic guitar” like it is an accepted rule of thumb (with tons of exceptions, I know). And the extra heft was cool – it felt comfortable and it slowed me down – in a good way, enabling me to be a bit more precise and keeping my attempts at a vibrato waggle under a bit more control.
Okay – so I need a big honkin’ brass slide – what do I do? A bit more research and I found the slide I think the guy loaned me – a BigHeart Bronze Bomber. 3/16” thick bronze walls – I mean, this sucker is BIG. But so big, that guess what? They stopped making them because the price of bronze has gone through the roof and all the online sellers are out of stock. So I cast about looking for other slides - sure, there is the Robert Johnson slide (who collects royalties on those sales?), Dunlop brass and their curved Harris brass line – there are a ton of options out there – but none approach the mass of the BHBB. I thought about trying a Sears Craftsman deep socket – a classic slide if there ever was – but in reading up on Sears’ website, the walls of their sockets are significantly thinner than the BHBB. This will not do.
So – I get crafty! I went to my local hardware guy, Billy (not to be confused with Bill, the guy finishing – finally – the guitar body he’s working on for me). Sure enough, he has thick brass pipe. With a nod to Beavis and Butthead, the pipe I want to use is referred to in plumbing-speak as a “nipple.” The nipple in question is brass, 1/8” thick walls (not as thick as the BB, but much heftier than any others I found). It is not highly polished, and in fact has a script “W” and “China” stamped on one side of the pipe. How cool is that?
So Ramon, Billy’s clerk, takes the nipple and cuts the threads off of either end, free of charge, leaving it perfect slide length. He then – you knew it was coming – ground the ends of my nipple to blunt them somewhat. I buy a sheet of emery cloth – all in, I am out, oh, about $5.50.
I get it home and through a combo of filing and using the rough cloth, I smooth out the edges. Very comfy on my pinky finger, sitting just above/on the knuckle, so the last two segments of my finger are covered, but I can flex the finger around the neck.
When I try it – it totally works! It has a different tone and feel from the BB – I still need to find one – but it is great in its own way. I play a bit of acoustic and then on my Tele and have a great time. What’s even cooler is that, with the W-China turned away, I end up polishing a spot on the opposite side from rubbing it against the strings….
Much fun.
