I need some advice on slide guitar.

[ledzepp29]

Hey whats up, I was wondering if someone could share some theory about slide guitar playing. i know you have to tune to open A or E etc. when you tune to these tunings do you have to play different scale patterns? different chord patterns? I'm very confused about this. I'm self taught so I dont take lessons, but I know all of the pentatonic scales major and minor and such. If someone could give me some basic theory that would be awesome cause I'm clueless

 

[Curly]

Re: I need some advice on slide guitar.

I use open G

drop your 6, 5, and 1 strings a whole step (2 frets), and use your octaves to cross tune, too

I have a couple slide clips on one of my telecaster pages

 

[ledzepp29]

Re: I need some advice on slide guitar.

thanks curly!

 

[kmcguitars]

Re: I need some advice on slide guitar.

Hey whats up, I was wondering if someone could share some theory about slide guitar playing. i know you have to tune to open A or E etc. when you tune to these tunings do you have to play different scale patterns? different chord patterns? I'm very confused about this. I'm self taught so I dont take lessons, but I know all of the pentatonic scales major and minor and such. If someone could give me some basic theory that would be awesome cause I'm clueless

O.K. 1st thing ya need to know is there's no law that you have to use a
open tuning. You can play in STD. if you like,The reason most slide players
use open tunings is to play chords like you mentions. There's no real
chord patterns playing slide cuz' everything is linear. But when you change
tuning you'll get different chords in different place's. In STD. your D,G,B,
strings will form a chord. I like to use faux open tunings. tune your G string
a step up will give you a fake E tuning, drop your high E down to D will give
you a fake open G. Hope this helps

 

[ledzepp29]

Re: I need some advice on slide guitar.

alright I see, I'll go give it a try

 

[Stevo]

Re: I need some advice on slide guitar.

I've seen guys pick up beer bottles at a bar and just jam away in regular tuning.. it's very cool when someone is good enough to do that
Ahem.. but.. I need all of the help I can get I like to tune my open strings to an E chord. That way you can bar chords and get some thick sounds.

 

[shred me good]

Re: I need some advice on slide guitar.

i play slide in STD (not a wierd desise i have discovered)
i find it easyer beceaue it saves the trouble of relearning scales and chords.
if you pay in std there are quite a few places where a barre across 2 adacednt strings)barred with the slide of course) sounds good, 3 adjasent strings there are fewer and youl be hard pushed to incorperate more than 4 strings at once, especialy when improvising. so you realy need to decide wheather you want to go for an open tuning (i use open e) or if you keep STD, learn all the chords you can make and use them in improvising!
ps if you do opt for an open tuining you could start a thread on that.