Playing slide guitar

This post is a kind of add-on to this earlier post on slide guitar and this post on the DADGAD tuning featuring Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir.

A slide is a tube over the guitar player’s finger which moves up and down the neck of the guitar. This produces an expressive wailing sound which immediately grabs the heart strings of the receptive listener. Slide guitar playing is not rocket science but there is a bit of a learning curve involved. For instance you can forget about the idea of pressing the strings down onto the fretboard. Slide players just touch the strings lightly with the slide.

If you tune your guitar to one of the open tunings, where strumming the open strings plays a chord, you immediately feel that you have a world of feelings to express and the slide guitar is giving you the wherewithal to express them. Once you begin to play the slide guitar you will see that you need to mute some strings because you are not going to need to play all of the strings all of the time. Also, if you want to play notes that are not included in the open chord that your guitar is tuned to, you will need practice in fretting the strings with the fingers not carrying the slide, plus you will have to learn where the notes are in the open tuning. This is why we usually spend a long time devoted to playing slide guitar in one particular tuning before we move onto other open tunings.

Here is a list of open tunings for slide guitar playing:

Open E: E B E G# B E

Open D: D A D F# A D

Open A: E A E A C# E

Open G: D G D G B D

Drop D: D A D G B E

This video goes into the problem of playing minor chords in open D tuning: