How To Play Slide Guitar

Slide guitar. Slide guitar is different from the other styles because it's quite customary to tune the guitar to an open chord. In this case, I've got it tuned to G.

That means, when I just strum the strings without any fingers on it, I'm playing a chord, a major chord G. The advantage of this is you can play chords in a straight line, and why that's going to be useful is because you're going to be using a slide, which obviously hasn't got any bends in it. So I can just play a chord by just sliding into it in a straight line.

It gives a completely different sound than the usual style of guitar and you do not press down on the strings; you're gliding over the top of them, so the slide never presses down, and also the slide never goes behind the fret, it goes above the fret. So normally, you'd play a chord like that, so your fingers would depress behind this fret here, but in this case, I'm going to play right over the fret. I'm not there, I'm there; otherwise, it'd be out of tune.

Right on the fret. So I'm going to play a G now, then a C, then a D. So I never pressed down at all there, and basically, that was a twelve-bar in G.

So G is at the twelfth fret, C is at the fifth, back to G again, chord five is just D at the seventh, chord four, C again, which is at the fifth, and you've got the G, open or the twelfth. You might want to lose a lot of vibrato, it really is sort of one of the primary features of slide guitar. And that's the essence of slide guitar. .