Slide Foundations
Published: Tue, 01/23/24
Which is not to say that I had no instruction or input when it came to the latter disciplines, just that it was less formal. I learned to play slide guitar my freshman year by hanging out in the practice rooms after hours with one Steadman Hinckley, both of us thumping away on a steady bass while we traded Duane Allman licks, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. And I learned the essentials of pattern picking from Lucille Magliozzi, the guitar teacher at the town rec center, when my main axe was still a three-quarter-size Harmony acoustic borrowed from the neighbors (in case I lost interest).
I learned a lot about slide from records, too. Having weaseled my way into a gig writing Electric Slide Guitar for Hal Leonard, I realized I had better do my homework, and set about transcribing Muddy Waters, Elmore James, Ry Cooder, more Duane Allman, and others, learning a ridiculous amount along the way. I was particularly taken with Ry Cooder's use of hammerons and pulloffs in open position, something that remains an integral part of my slide playing to this day.
Somewhere along the way, my fascination with solo fingerstyle guitar and my interest in slide merged into a third thing, viz., playing slide over an alternating-thumb bass. Because I ultimately wanted to be able to do the same thing with the slide that I could do without it: hold down a groove, play melodies over that, and make it sound bluesy. If you've always wanted to be able to do that, too, well, that's exactly what I'll be teaching in this Saturday's Slide Foundations workshop.
We'll start with getting an alternating-thumb groove going on some essential open D chord voicings. Next, we'll look at slide technique itself: what notes to use, how to get a good sound, and all the key articulations you can do with the slide, from hammerons and pulloffs to grace notes and quarter-tone slides. Finally, we'll bring the groove and the slide together to play a complete version of a traditional blues tune, using a combination of slide and fretted notes and chords over an alternating thumb bass.
Registration is currently open for Slide Foundations, and you can sign up here:
Slide Foundations
For some people, the whole idea of open tunings – scrambling the fretboard by re-tuning the guitar – is enough to put the whole endeavor of learning slide beyond the pale. But you really only need a few chords to get started, and they're not that hard to find – you just need a couple good I, IV and V chord shapes to get going, just like in standard tuning. That's what I go over in today's Youtube lesson, which you can find at the link below:
Chords In Open D Tuning
More soon,
David