Hello Youtube, Goodbye Mudslide
Published: Fri, 01/26/24
The one we both liked was maybe a dozen years old, and the only reason I could come up with not to take it home immediately was that it was a little too custom – all blinged out with herringbone purfling and inlay on the headstock, so it didn't quite have that classic minimalist J-45 vibe. But it played faaan-tastic and I was seriously tempted, despite having tried a handful of actually vintage Gibsons recently and concluded I was really just a Martin guy, and that was that.
Then, I spent significantly less on a Dunlop Mudslide and split.
Now, I do have a whole drawer full of slides, but largely because there was a point in my trajectory when slides just sort of came to me. It's like that uncle who wears the bowties; everyone knows what to get that guy. So glass, ceramic, porcelain, brass, all sizes and lengths – some homemade, some mass-produced, some in-between, even (of course) a couple of wrench sockets I picked up while pawn shopping with my friend Byron in Reno. (They're not too practical, but it makes a good story.)
The ones I like best are glass and ceramic (or porcelain) and, guess what – those are the ones with the shortest life expectancy. For some time, my favorite glass slide was a hand-cut bottleneck polished to perfection by the late Steve James; he used to make up a handful at a time and sell them at gigs. That one finally chipped, and eventually shattered. I also really like the porcelain Moonshine slides Dunlop sells, and, for a time, was in touch with the woman who invented them; my stash of those has pretty much gone the way of all things now too.
Rummaging through what's left last week, I found one remaining intact Mudslide – ceramic, hardly used, nearly perfect in length and diameter. I got comfortable enough with it to shoot two videos for the channel and then, just after hitting "save" on the last file, managed to sweep the Mudslide from the desk. It landed on the concrete floor and immediately did what all ceramic things do when they hit concrete floors. Hello Youtube, goodbye Mudslide.
I fancy myself someone who can kind of take it or leave it in the gear department, but a development like this makes me realize how jive that is – you can have the most amazing guitar in the world, but if your $20 interface with the fretboard sucks, you're never going to get the sound you want.
So when I'm more honest with myself, I have to admit that good gear matters, especially when you're getting started on something new. Because good gear removes variables. With something like slide, it's so much about the sound. If it doesn't sound good, you can blame your sucky slide. Until you have a good one, and then you can't. Once you have good gear, the only thing missing is you – how you're holding the slide, the notes you're choosing, the way you're playing them.
So good gear matters because it helps you troubleshoot the player. Which makes me think I should really circle back on that J-45 after all. But in the meantime, I've got to round up a few more good slides for this Saturday's Slide Foundations workshop. When I will most definitely be talking about how to get a great sound with the slide, from how to hold it, angle it and damp the strings behind it, to playing hammerons, pulloffs, grace notes, staccato notes and more.
Besides your sound, this workshop will focus on three main topics: how to get oriented in open D tuning in the first place, how to coordinate your slide licks with an alternating-thumb groove, and how to put all that together to play a complete 12-bar blues tune. So once you've got that great sound, you'll also know what to do with it and how to integrate it into your own playing.
You can still register for tomorrow's Slide Foundations class. To join me live, or just watch later on-demand, go to the link below and sign up:
Slide Foundations
This morning, I'll be live on Youtube at 10:30am Central talking about my five favorite eight-bar blues tunes (and maybe answering a few questions about tomorrow's workshop as well). You can find that here:
Top 5 Eight Bar Blues – Live!
More soon,
David