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Part III: Beyond the Basics: Playing Like a Pro
An oldie but goodie: Slide guitar
With all this talk of left-hand slides, you may
wonder how the genre of slide guitar factors in
here. Slide guitar is essential to blues history and
the blues repertoire. Prewar acoustic countryblues
guitarists often incorporated some lefthand
fretting in slide guitar because they generally
played solo and needed to accompany their
vocals with chords, riffs, and bass lines.
Contemporary electric-slide guitarists playing in a
band context usually use no fretting at all, relinquishing
any left-hand contact with the strings to
a metal or glass tube (the slide), which is dragged
lightly over the strings above the fretboard.
In slide guitar, the bar never fully depresses the
strings. Instead, you press down on the strings
directly over the fret wires with just enough
pressure to make them ring clear and rattle-free
but not so hard that they touch the fingerboard.
Playing the guitar with a slide produces truly
continuous (infinitely small-interval) pitch
changes, similar to the sliding effect of a fretless
bass, violin, cello, or other fretless string
instruments, as well as a trombone. Playing
slides with a left-hand finger moving on a fretted
guitar only approximates this sound. You can
play slide guitar in standard tuning, but many
guitarists find it more versatile to tune the guitar
to an open chord, such as D or G (or their relative
equivalents, E and A), which allows for
better chord-playing. For more on slide guitar,
see Chapters 11, 12, and 13.
A little flair for just one note: Quick slides
Quick slides (like the ones you play in Figure 10-4) are used to adorn individual
notes. You just push your way into or out of a note from a nearby fret
instead of hitting it dead on.
Quick slides in and out of notes are also called indeterminate slides because
the note of origin (going up in pitch on the ascending slide) or destination
(on the descending slide) isn’t important.
Slides connecting two melody notes, with some rhythm in between
Sometimes you want to start with one specific note and end up on another
specific note, but you want to connect them by using a slide. For these types
of slides, you must factor in the rhythm of the slide between the two notes.
Slides work equally well ascending or descending and are indicated in notation
with a straight line in the appropriate direction with a slur over or under
the line.
Figure 10-5 shows slides between melody notes in different rhythms.
TEAM LinG