Slide Guitar: Use What You Already Know
Published: Thu, 01/25/24
We're totally going to that, because Ms. F and I certainly felt an immediate affinity for anyone who explains, as Steve did, that "the Band, well, they're like my second Beatles." There it is. Although I secretly think that, in calling themselves Wheels On Fire, they missed an opportunity to simply call themselves the (Tribute) Band. But you can't comment on what your friends name their kids, and it's sort of the same thing here.
The thing about the Band, and the Beatles for that matter, is that they both sounded so good to me that for the longest time, it didn't even occur to me to try and figure out what was really going on. While I worked out my share of Beatles guitar parts, and can deliver a passable interpretation of "Ophelia" if playing with friends, it never crossed my mind to try and figure out how to write songs like the Beatles, or the Band, and as far as what's going on vocally – well, sorting that out seemed on a par with a caveman attempting to map out the cerebral cortex.
I felt that way for a long time about records like Ry Cooder's Paradise and Lunch and Into The Purple Valley, too. But once I determined to figure out once and for all what was going on, at least with Cooder's slide playing, I was helped tremendously by a couple of sentences from a late-'70s Guitar Player interview in which the bottleneck wizard explained that he used open G tuning for playing rhythm guitar and open D tuning for slide.
Cooder played a lot of slide in open position on those records, and either re-tuned or used a capo to get to keys like E and F. What's cool about that is, for one thing, playing slide in open position involves a lot of hammerons and pulloffs, things you're already familiar with from playing regular guitar. For another, your pentatonic scales, both major and minor, look exactly the same on the top two strings in open D tuning as they do in standard tuning. Which means when it's time to start messing with the slide itself, at least you know more or less where you're at as far as the notes to play, and a significant part of the technique as well.
In today's Youtube lesson, I explain where to find those open-position D minor and D major pentatonic scales in open D tuning; you can watch it here:
Pentatonic Licks For Slide Guitar
Relating slide guitar and open D tuning to things you already know how to do is a central premise of my upcoming Slide Foundations workshop, which will introduce you to playing slide in three basic steps:
- How to play alternating bass through a basic I-IV-V progression in open D
- How to play essential slide sounds like hammerons, pulloffs, grace note slides and quarter-tone slides, and get a good sound with the slide while doing so, and
- How to combine slide licks with the alternating-thumb groove to play a complete twelve-bar blues in D
Slide Foundations
More soon,
David