How to Use a Slide on Guitar

Video Transcript

Hi! My name is John Armstrong with expertvillage.com. I am a professional guitar instructor and today we will be discussing slide guitar and slide guitar techniques. Alright, the next thing I would like to discuss today is the actual slide technique regardless of which finger you choose to use. What you will do when wanting to achieve a note, when wanting to achieve a tone on the guitar using slide. When fretting a normal note as you press down on the fret wire, the point of contact on the string is made at the actual fret wire, so regardless of where you press down in the fret itself the note is shortened at the fret wire, the string is shortened at the fret wire. With slide though we are not pressing down into the string that is the whole idea behind it, is that you get a nice smooth sliding sound between notes, because there are no fret wires. There is no use of the fret wire. So in order to achieve an exact tone for example if I wanted to play this D note right here at the seventh fret of the third string, here it is fretted. In order to achieve that tone using slide, I have to get as directly above that fret wire as possible. If I am a little off, if I am little above the fret wire or little behind it, it is not going to be the exact pitch, which is sometimes one of the cool things about slide, that we can achieve a kind of note between notes what we refer to as a semitone. You kind of go outside the realm of the twelve note musical alphabet that we have.

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