{"id":1109,"date":"2022-03-18T02:22:58","date_gmt":"2022-03-18T02:22:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.finalguitar.com\/?p=1109"},"modified":"2022-03-18T02:22:58","modified_gmt":"2022-03-18T02:22:58","slug":"improve-your-blues-guitar-playing-with-a-slide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.finalguitar.com\/blog\/improve-your-blues-guitar-playing-with-a-slide\/","title":{"rendered":"Improve Your Blues Guitar Playing with a Slide"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe width=\"100%\" height=300vh src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/vvyMRcBHAmY?autoplay=1&#038;mute=1\"><\/iframe>Why do you want to learn slide guitar?<\/p>\n<p>If you are still reading this, my guess is that you have become interested in learning how to play slide guitar. I&#8217;m glad. I love the sound of it and I hope that you will too. But before we get started, I think it would be helpful if we had a talk about why you want to learn slide guitar.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m going to make a few assumptions about why many people pick up a slide for the first time. In fact, I&#8217;m going to make five assumptions.<\/p>\n<p>1. You have heard some great blues playing and decided that you&#8217;d like to add some of those elements to your own music. This is probably the number one reason people pick up the slide.<\/p>\n<p>2. You have seen a picture of Johnny Winter or Derek Trucks playing the blues with the guitar slung low and thought it looked cool. This is probably the second most common reason people want to learn slide guitar.<\/p>\n<p>3. You want to play like Ry Cooder or Bonnie Raitt. When you hear them play, they just sound so slick and smooth that you are drawn into their music and can&#8217;t get enough of it!<\/p>\n<p>4. You want to jam with your friends and make them look at you<\/p>\n<p>Slide guitar is a wonderful way to add a new dimension to your playing. It can be used in both blues and rock music but is most often associated with the blues. The slide is simply a piece of glass or metal that you wear on your finger to create notes when sliding along the strings.<\/p>\n<p>Slide guitar has been around for decades, but it was Elmore James who really made this technique popular. Over the years many people have come up with their own style of slide playing, adding to what Elmore James created. There are many less common tunings used by slide players, but I will just cover open D tuning here. Open D tuning is what most artists use such as Duane Allman, Derek Trucks and Ry Cooder.<\/p>\n<p>Open D tuning is achieved by tuning the strings to: D A D F<\/p>\n<p>Slide guitar is a technique used in Blues music to create long musical notes. The guitar player uses a metallic or glass tube called a slide that is placed on the ring or little finger of the picking hand and slid over the frets of the instrument to change pitch.<\/p>\n<p>Slides are made from various materials such as glass, metal, ceramic, or stone. In some cases a bottleneck was also used. A bottleneck is a small glass tube with one end cut at an angle so it will fit on the finger better. Today you can get slides in many different shapes and sizes made out of many different materials including stainless steel, bronze, and brass.<\/p>\n<p>Slide guitar has been an integral part of the blues since its inception. The earliest recorded blues song, WC Handy&#8217;s &#8220;Memphis Blues&#8221;, is a slide guitar instrumental; Blind Willie Johnson and other artists used the slide to imitate trains and other machinery.<\/p>\n<p>The technique is dead simple: place a piece of metal or glass against the strings, depress them on a fret, pluck the string and slide up or down the neck to change notes. The result can be subtle or dramatic and it&#8217;s almost always effective.<\/p>\n<p>Slides have their roots in African-American folk music. They were originally made from empty bottles with necks that were placed over guitar strings, but today they are commercially manufactured with glass or metal.<\/p>\n<p>The slide guitar is a very unique and expressive sounding instrument. The sound is so unique that it can be instantly recognized once you hear it. It has been used in many different musical styles from Blues to Country, Bluegrass to Rockabilly and more.<\/p>\n<p>Slides are very inexpensive and easy to find in any music store but how do you go about getting started? If you are already familiar with the guitar then you should have no problem at all getting started with the slide. The most important thing to remember is that you should play with a slide on your finger at all times when practicing. It will take some time to get use to playing with a slide on but I promise that after a while you will feel odd without it!<\/p>\n<p>Slide guitars can be played either acoustic or electric but the electric version is more common. Many people choose to play electric because it is much easier to control your volume when using an electric or amplifier than it is if you are playing acoustic at full volume in front of an audience! For this reason most electric players choose not to use a thumb pick and just use their bare thumb instead, which leaves two fingers free for fretting chords and picking single notes.<\/p>\n<p>The idea behind the slide guitar was originally invented by African-American slaves who adapted<\/p>\n<p>Slide guitar is a technique for playing the guitar that is often used in blues-style music. This technique involves pressing a metal or glass cylinder against the strings of the guitar while picking notes and chords to create a distinctive and unique sound.<\/p>\n<p>If you are interested in learning how to play slide guitar, use these tips to learn more:<\/p>\n<p>What Is Slide Guitar?<\/p>\n<p>A slide is simply a piece of glass or metal that is placed on one of the fingers. The slide is then used to play notes and chords on the fretboard of your guitar.<\/p>\n<p>Slide guitar usually carries a bluesy sound to it, although it can be used in other genres as well. The style was popularized by Delta blues artists such as Robert Johnson, Son House, and Muddy Waters. In fact, Johnson was known for playing an adapted version of open D tuning that allowed him to easily execute slide licks and riffs.<\/p>\n<p>How Do You Play Slide Guitar?<\/p>\n<p>To play slide guitar, you need to first understand how to tune your instrument for slide playing. The easiest way to do this is by using an electric tuner or an online tuner that allows you to tune each string individually until it reaches the note desired. To get started, we recommend tuning your strings<\/p>\n<p>The history of slide guitar is a long, complicated and important one. But it&#8217;s all about the blues, which means it&#8217;s all about the most basic, primal emotions that we as humans experience. It&#8217;s about joy, it&#8217;s about heartbreak, it&#8217;s about love, it&#8217;s about pain and anguish, it&#8217;s full of high highs and low lows and everything in between.<\/p>\n<p>Slide guitar is often associated with Southern music like the blues and delta blues, but the origin of slide guitar actually lies outside of the United States in Hawai&#8217;i. In fact, the first slide guitars were made by making notches in a metal tube that was then placed on a string to form different chords.<iframe width=\"100%\"\" height=300vh src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/STATfuf_Hps?autoplay=1&#038;mute=1\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Why do you want to learn slide guitar? If you are still reading this, my guess is that you have become interested in learning how to play slide guitar. I&#8217;m glad. I love the sound of it and I hope that you will too. But before we get started, I think it would be helpful [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.finalguitar.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1109"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.finalguitar.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.finalguitar.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.finalguitar.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.finalguitar.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1109"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.finalguitar.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1109\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1110,"href":"https:\/\/www.finalguitar.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1109\/revisions\/1110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.finalguitar.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.finalguitar.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.finalguitar.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}