How To Play Slide Guitar

Learning how to play slide guitar can add a layer of color to your guitar style. Slide guitar is the term applied to a style of guitar playing found frequently in blues, rock and country music. Another term for the playing style is bottle neck guitar. Things you'll need to play slide guitar include

• guitar
• slide

1. Place the slide on the middle or ring finger of your fretting hand. The slide is a metal tube you will use on the strings of your guitar to play slide notes. Apply a Get the gentle downward pressure on any of your strings over any fret, then pick that string and move your slide up or down the string to create a slide effect. This will sound almost like a steel guitar. Play another note and move the slide back and forth on the string more quickly, in short movements. This will produce a sliding sound that goes up and down in pitch. Practice this until you have a good feel for how different hand movements can create different sounds.
2. Select the tuning you want to use to play slide. You can play slide guitar in a standard tuning, but there are several other tunings that work well. One of the most popular is the G tuning, which makes the open strings of your guitar a G chord. The notes are tuned, from thickest to thinnest, D-G-B-G-B and D.
3. Play around with your slide to create your own guitar licks. Use a combination of long, slow slides up or down the neck. Add the short, quick movements to help change the feel of your licks.
4. Record a chord progression in the key of G that you can use as a backing track to practice your slide playing. The progression can be a simple strum pattern featuring a G-D-C-D pattern with up and down strums. Play this recorded pattern back and practice using your slide to create licks over it.
5. Add techniques to color your playing. These techniques include muting or damping your strings with the side of your palm, playing fretted notes in between your slide licks and even adding string bends to the mix. These techniques will not only give your solos a personal signature, but will help you improve other aspects of your playing while you learn the art of slide guitar.