Standard Tuning Slide Guitar Pt. 1
A really cool and useful technique to know if you're a guitarist is how to play some slide. Whenever I'm playing with a group and I pull out the slide to add some flavor to a song, the other guys almost inevitably love it. Not only that, because the sound itself is so expressive, you don't need to be able to play anything really flashy or complicated. If the part calls for something technically demanding, you probably shouldn't be using a slide, unless that's your forte. If you just need to add some color and some tasty fills, though, it's a great way to sound soulful and unique. Unfortunately, if you're not familiar with slide at all, it can be frustrating; and, a shitty, out of tune slide part is just about the worst possible thing you can contribute to a song as a guitarist.
I have a pretty strong memory of trying to learn how to play slide shortly after I started playing, failing miserably, and then giving it up. After that, every few years, I would intermittently pick it up again and then give up a few days later. I think one reason I had trouble getting the hang of slide is that I never settled on how I wanted to play it. Typically, beginning players are advised to play slide in an open tuning and with their fingers. Unfortunately, I was playing electric guitar with a pick and in standard tuning, so that's what I was more comfortable with, and I had trouble deciding what combination of tuning and pick technique to use. Whenever I played in an open tuning or with my fingers I felt lost and didn't know what to play, aside from just copping some standard licks note for note. Not only that, retuning the guitar is a hassle and discourages you from practicing consistently.
Then one day I sat down and played around with a slide in standard tuning, with a pick, and managed to string together a couple of licks that sounded okay. I decided to stick with standard tuning for slide, and eventually came up with a few good strategies for this. I ended up deciding the open tuned slide is a little bit overrated. There's nothing wrong with it, but what really matters is to do whatever feels good to you and stick with it. I suspect a lot of typical electric guitarists are, like me, more comfortable in standard. This being the case, I think the emphasis that most people place on open tuned slide is misplaced. I occasionally play in an open tuning these days, but for the most part I've decided that standard works at least as well as an open tuning for most things, the main exceptions being rhythm stuff where you're playing a lot of major chords. For the most part, the ideas I'm gong to outline are meant for lead playing.
One advantage of playing slide in standard is that you get to rely on all the fretboard knowledge you already have; not only that, as you get used to moving around with a slide, you'll find that it influences your regular playing. I think this is a big advantage you won't get with open tunings, where you have to reprogram your brain completely and visualize the fretboard differently.
The first thing that occurred to me while I was trying to come up with a standard tuning strategy is that in open E (a popular tuning among slide guitarists) the top two strings are tuned to E and B, so they're exactly the same as standard tuning. That seemed like a good place to start. It turns out you can get a lot of mileage out of these two strings. In fact, I think it's superior to a lot of the position playing stuff that beginning slide guitar players are usually advised to try in open E. For example, this is a very popular open E position for slide guitar:
The biggest problem with this strategy, and slide playing in general, is crossing strings. When you play a note with a slide, the string tends to ring out unless you actively stop it. This is why it's usually recommended that people play with their fingers; this gives them the ability to mute the strings with some fingers while plucking them with others. If you don't do this, you can get a lot of unwanted noise and notes that you don't want. Learning to control unwanted string noise is definitely an important part of learning slide.
What I don't understand, though, is why beginners are advised to learn how to play within a two fret box that requires them to change strings constantly. Yes, this does let you play a series of notes without moving the slide, which might help you keep your intonation straight, but if you want to play slide you need to get used to moving the slide and using your ear to find the right location on the string. Also, to me, the wound strings tend to be a lot more noisy and hard to control than the unwound strings. I would generally rather slide down the fretboard on the unwound strings to play a lower note, as opposed to changing to a wound string, unless I'm intentionally playing something gnarly. Instead of playing across all the strings on these two frets, let's rotate this idea 90 degrees and see what the good old minor pentatonic scale looks like on the top two strings (the scale above isn't actually the minor pentatonic scale, it's a kind of hybrid scale, so the notes in the two diagrams aren't exactly the same, but we're guitarists so we know the minor pentatonic is going to be useful):
I have a pretty strong memory of trying to learn how to play slide shortly after I started playing, failing miserably, and then giving it up. After that, every few years, I would intermittently pick it up again and then give up a few days later. I think one reason I had trouble getting the hang of slide is that I never settled on how I wanted to play it. Typically, beginning players are advised to play slide in an open tuning and with their fingers. Unfortunately, I was playing electric guitar with a pick and in standard tuning, so that's what I was more comfortable with, and I had trouble deciding what combination of tuning and pick technique to use. Whenever I played in an open tuning or with my fingers I felt lost and didn't know what to play, aside from just copping some standard licks note for note. Not only that, retuning the guitar is a hassle and discourages you from practicing consistently.
Then one day I sat down and played around with a slide in standard tuning, with a pick, and managed to string together a couple of licks that sounded okay. I decided to stick with standard tuning for slide, and eventually came up with a few good strategies for this. I ended up deciding the open tuned slide is a little bit overrated. There's nothing wrong with it, but what really matters is to do whatever feels good to you and stick with it. I suspect a lot of typical electric guitarists are, like me, more comfortable in standard. This being the case, I think the emphasis that most people place on open tuned slide is misplaced. I occasionally play in an open tuning these days, but for the most part I've decided that standard works at least as well as an open tuning for most things, the main exceptions being rhythm stuff where you're playing a lot of major chords. For the most part, the ideas I'm gong to outline are meant for lead playing.
One advantage of playing slide in standard is that you get to rely on all the fretboard knowledge you already have; not only that, as you get used to moving around with a slide, you'll find that it influences your regular playing. I think this is a big advantage you won't get with open tunings, where you have to reprogram your brain completely and visualize the fretboard differently.
The first thing that occurred to me while I was trying to come up with a standard tuning strategy is that in open E (a popular tuning among slide guitarists) the top two strings are tuned to E and B, so they're exactly the same as standard tuning. That seemed like a good place to start. It turns out you can get a lot of mileage out of these two strings. In fact, I think it's superior to a lot of the position playing stuff that beginning slide guitar players are usually advised to try in open E. For example, this is a very popular open E position for slide guitar:
The biggest problem with this strategy, and slide playing in general, is crossing strings. When you play a note with a slide, the string tends to ring out unless you actively stop it. This is why it's usually recommended that people play with their fingers; this gives them the ability to mute the strings with some fingers while plucking them with others. If you don't do this, you can get a lot of unwanted noise and notes that you don't want. Learning to control unwanted string noise is definitely an important part of learning slide.
What I don't understand, though, is why beginners are advised to learn how to play within a two fret box that requires them to change strings constantly. Yes, this does let you play a series of notes without moving the slide, which might help you keep your intonation straight, but if you want to play slide you need to get used to moving the slide and using your ear to find the right location on the string. Also, to me, the wound strings tend to be a lot more noisy and hard to control than the unwound strings. I would generally rather slide down the fretboard on the unwound strings to play a lower note, as opposed to changing to a wound string, unless I'm intentionally playing something gnarly. Instead of playing across all the strings on these two frets, let's rotate this idea 90 degrees and see what the good old minor pentatonic scale looks like on the top two strings (the scale above isn't actually the minor pentatonic scale, it's a kind of hybrid scale, so the notes in the two diagrams aren't exactly the same, but we're guitarists so we know the minor pentatonic is going to be useful):
We've also changed keys here, but A minor lays out nicely on the middle of the fretboard so I decided to use it to illustrate the idea. You should be able to transpose this stuff pretty easily if you're an intermediate guitarist. The first thing to notice here is that, of the five notes in the minor pentatonic scale, four notes have a neighboring note on the same fret on both the E and B strings. This is great because it means if both strings ring out, you won't play something sour. The easiest way for me to think of this layout is by visualizing the standard root position pentatonic minor box (in A that means at the fifth and eighth frets), and then adding notes on both strings two frets above and below the position. When I first started playing like this, I tended to think in terms of two separate positions. So you can center yourself at your normal root position, and then move around between this lower box:
And this upper box:
These two boxes each contain four of the five total notes in the pentatonic scale (the lower box has every note but the minor 3rd, and the upper one has every note but the 5th). If you move between them, you can play a ton of stuff. The lower box contains the same notes as the top two strings on the open E diagram at the beginning of this post, so it's a good place to start if you want to emulate a bunch of traditional Elmore James style licks.
The upper box is the same as the Albert King box that blues guitarists use, so a good place to start with it is to take any Albert King licks you know and try to play them on slide. You might also try sliding up to the fifth two frets above (the 12th fret in the key of A), but keep in mind that's the one position where the B string does not have a note in the scale on that same fret (the 12th fret on the B string is the 2nd, which isn't a terrible note to hit, but it isn't in the minor pentatonic scale).
If you want to use this idea in a different key, just move it up or down the fret board. Mentally, just picture your root position box in whatever key you're in, and stay two frets above and below it. For now, I would advise finding a few simple songs that you can jam to and try playing around with just these two boxes. You don't even need to worry about the fifth pair of notes, where the E and B strings are off by one fret in the pentatonic scale. Let It Bleed by The Rolling Stones is in C and was one of the first tunes I used to play along to. I'm going to post a little more on this later, including some stuff on taking advantage of the major third interval between the G and B strings to play some major pentatonic ideas.
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