I have said many times here that I am primarily a drummer who switched to guitar.
I can play the Scheisse out of my Slingerlands, but I’m only an amateur on my guitars. This leads me to the following question: Keeping in mind that I will never be a Chet Atkins on any of my axes, how tough would it be for me to learn slide guitar?
My last “girlfriend” left one of her lipsticks in my medicine cabinet, and I also have an old wine bottle from Italy. What else do I need?
Of course y’all know I’m just kidding, but really: how difficult is it to play slide?
If you know how to tune to an open tuning (open G, open E, etc.), then it is quite easy to make some sweet sounds on the slide. Learning songs can be a bit more tricky, but I am no Duane Allman either!
You can learn open tunings a number of places on the web. From the top of my head try http://harmony-central.com
On one hand, Quasi - super easy. On the other hand, a lifetime of work. Slide is simple to learn, and infinitely demanding to master.
Credentials - I’ve played for over 25 years, mostly rock and blues, know enough slide to be dangerous.
Keys:
Unless you are very patient, you should use an open tuning on your slide guitar - typically Open G (D, G, D, G, B, D - Keith Richards’ fave tuning). That way you get a major chord when you capo at a given fret, use one finger to barre the strings at a single fret (i.e., use your finger like a capo - duh) or lay a slide across the strings - without pressing down so hard that you are fretting the note. This tuning should result in a slide sound that is very familiar. By the way - in case you didn’t know, the slide should sit right above a given fret, not between, as with fingerings. The slide becomes, in effect, a sliding fret.
Learn to love arpeggios and sliding - play the Open G all open, then lay the slide down at about the 3rd fret and quickly slide up to the 7th fret. The 12th fret. The 5th fret. Start at the 12th and bring it down to the 7th. You should hear very familiar slide sounds. Now do the same stuff while picking the notes - especially the 2nd, 3rd and 4th highest strings (the B, G, and D in the middle) again, should sound very familiar.
Get set up right - have a guitar with a high enough action - string distance off the neck - so you can lay the slide down on the strings with some pressure, but not enough to fret the notes. (most hard rock/heavy metal guitars have too close an action to be even remotely usable). Also, expect to use heavier gauge strings - .10’s on the high E at least. Experiment with metal and glass slides and with your middle, ring and pinkie fingers. Every combo of these are used by any number of very respected slide players - pick one or two role models and try their approach. I use my pinkie so I can fret with my other three fingers - I rarely play slide full time on a song - only use it for accents.
Listen to favorite slide songs, and download tab from Olga or alt.guitar.tab
Beyond that, once you get on your feet, so to speak, there are tons of places you can go. Heck, listen to “I want to be the boy to warm your mother’s heart” off the White Stripes latest CD, Elephant - very, very simple slide break in the middle, but delivered very powerfully with a truly beautiful tone. Easy to replicate the motions, but very hard to capture feel and sound.
I haven’t Libertarian - what can you tell us about it?
In terms of slide players, it is tough - some of the best, like Ry Cooder, Duane Allman, Roy Rogers, the fella from New Orleans (what is his name? Snooks Eaglin or something?) are all such monsters, but they do stuff that is darn near impossible, or worse, they do slide in standard tuning, which makes it easier to transition back and forth between slide and fretted playing, but is a bear to learn.
There are plenty of rock, blues and country slide players that do simple, effective slide that sounds amazing and would get a new player on track. Heck, listen to some Zeppelin tracks (what’s the one off Physical Graffiti?) or Black Crowes’ Twice as Hard - I don’t want to hold those up as ideals, but they are simple to learn and sound decent to.
Oh - and when you are laying down the slide across the strings, make sure you lay down your other fingers - the ones closer to the peghead (e.g., if you slide with your ring, then use your index and middle fingers) on the strings, too, to cut down on extraneous noise, feedback and ringing…
I found you a small sample of it at MSN. There’s just barely a bit of the slide in the sample toward the end, but if you have Tumbleweed Connection (and who doesn’t!), it’s the third song.
Yeah, “In My Time Of Dying” is pretty simple. I’m self taught, and never could figure out how to play slide. But I could play that (open tuning) and U2’s “Bullet The Blue Sky.”
With the Allman Brothers, Duane played slide almost exclusively in Open E (E B E G# B e) after their first album, and the stuff on that album works just as easily in E. He used other tunings while doing session work and things, but I’d say you can figure out most of his stuff that way. I think Ry Cooder primarily uses that tuning as well.