Super Beginner Slide Guitar Lesson

hey everyone and welcome back to Swift guitar lessons today a long overdue lesson on the basics of slide guitar let's begin by talking about the different types of slides that you're likely to find at your local music store most of you are probably used to seeing metal or brass slides which are made popular by guitar players like Johnny Winter or George Thorogood but I'm much more partial to the warm tones of a glass or ceramic slide and some of the ones you might find it's this very very nice replica of the old kora scene bottle made by Dunlop now this is a type of slide that was used by Duane Allman and more recently Derek Trucks these are great another option that you had is a thick ceramic slide this is made by mudslide and it's got a very heavy wall now the wall is the thickness of the glass basically the heavier the wall the warmer the tune and also the more control you're gonna have it's also going to give you more of an ability to get a clear tone out of it which is good for a beginner but the weight may throw you off just a bit takes some time to get used to okay and another option that we have here is a slide produced by a glassblower this is 100% customizable so if you have a glass blower or local to you see if they can make you a couple of these slides generally speaking they're easy to make and you can adjust the thickness of the wall and any designs that you might want so it's gonna look good on stage okay my favorite option save the best for last is a bottle next slide this is something that I've made myself just by removing the neck on a wine bottle like this now if you want to be able to make these yourself just follow the link right here and that'll take you to my video on how to remove the net grind it down the whole technique and all the tools that you're going to need as well alright now that you know a little bit about the types of slides that are out there let's take a closer look at the neck and get some of the technique down okay closed circuit the prep board and we're getting started with our introduction to slide technique for this lesson we're gonna be doing everything in the key of C so you have your C major chord but more valuable to us is the bar chord version okay the C major chord root it here off of the C note third fret a string this chord reveals a very very common and important position to all slide guitar players and it's a position that you can use to play over top of any major chord which is one of our goals in the immediate future okay so take notice of my third finger here which is draped across the fifth fret of the D G and B string playing some of that triad so we have a G note we have a CD and we have here the B string and you know our major third okay now let's learn how to play that chord using our slide okay so I'm gonna be getting started using my bottle next slide our goal is to be able to play a very clean note and after that a full C major triad so step number one we're gonna take the slide and put it right over the fifth fret now you're probably used to always have in your fingers right behind the fret but when you're using your slide you have to have it right on top of the fret so you'll see the fret going right up the middle of your slide okay now that you have the appropriate position make sure that your hand posture is correct your pointer finger should be draped across the strings so that way if the slide is taken off you have nothing but dead notes now the middle finger is going to work as a bit of support it's kind of as if it's connected to the ring finger which is holding my slide so with the pointer finger draped across the strings deaden in the notes and the middle finger on top of the slide it kind of creates a bit of a pyramid which is why I call this the pyramid technique where the pyramid posture okay so now I got my pyramid posture looks like this all right you see the pyramid and I had to slide right over the fifth fret I'm gonna see how my D string sounds okay I can try shaking it a little bit to get some vibrato let's see if I can get my g-string to wear my g-string sounds good as well and I can practice playing those notes individually all right or I can try to slide them all together at once just like that now with slide pitch is everything so make sure that you're using your clip-on tuner to get better at it you're gonna put it up on the headstock and make sure that all the notes are turning up green okay no flat and no sharp notes so just those three notes there was sound great over a C major chord you can try sliding from a half-step or see how a full step sounds okay it's at this point I would like for you to ditch your pick and adopt a finger style of technique when creating that same exact triad so you have a close look at my right hand and if I was going to fret that D string the way I would do it is I would do that with my thumb and I would use all of my other fingers here to block the strings that I don't want a note to be produced on alright that was me sliding from my fourth fret D string up to my fifth fret D string okay then if I want it my g string to produce a note I'll do the same thing slide from four to five I would block all the notes my thumb would stay put and believe it or not my thumb is actually blocking the low e a and also the D string alright if I wanted to do my B string I might use my middle finger or I might just bring the whole operation down and now my thumb is covering everything from e all the way to G alright it's in that particular instance that I might do something like play my g string and also my B string all right so you can practice going back and forth between the notes in that C major chord that you just learned trying to get nice clean notes out of that all right to be going down to the high E string now grab the notes off of my D string my g string my g string B string and also the high E string which sounds great over top of the C major chord okay so one of the other things I recommend is if you're learning a new slide line try to play it with your hands first and then see if you can experiment with the slide okay now that you can produce a nice clean tone you know how to play the C major triad and you know how the right hand works we're gonna learn how to produce melodies using our C major scale let's learn it using our first finger then I'll show you how to use your slide okay so my pointer finger here on the g string fifth fret and I go up a whole step then I'm here on the B string fifth fret a half-step to the sixth the eighth fret B string a whole step to the high E string fifth fret up a whole step to the seventh and here the octave eighth fret high E string so earlier I said this was a very important position because in that C major bard shape that triads right there and so is the scale okay now that you know how to play your C major scale and that high treble octave let's see if we can produce those notes nice and clean using your slide one two three four okay you practice that over and over again be very patient this can get a little frustrating so it's gonna take time and patience then once you have it start trying to produce a couple of melodies for example five five on the DNG seventh fret of the g string 6 fret B string and then right there to the B strings the major 3rd B string 5th fret all right so if I did that with my slide let's do it one more time with the fingers I'll try practice I'll let those two notes ring together maybe I'll throw in the eighth fret all right I love the sound of slide and back and forth between the g string fifth fret and 4th fret and back that's gonna sound great a triad over an E major chord you can play it in the key of F by going up to the tenth fret where you go up to the G by going to the twelfth fret to produce a full one four five progression all right Evelyn thanks so much for checking out this lesson on the basics to slide guitar I hope you enjoyed it thanks so much to my supporters at patreon.com thank you for making these lessons possible I got plenty more coming at you so keep checking back please subscribe please share this is Robert Swift guitar lessons in Philadelphia saying happy picking

Channel: swiftlessons

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Keywords: beginner slide guitar lesson, how to play slide guitar, blues slide guitar lesson, derek trucks guitar lesson, basic slide guitar lesson, lead guitar lesson, beginner guitar tutorial, best youtube guitar lessons, swift guitar lessons, guitar teachers in philadelphia

Id: g0F0rbcJxY4

Length: 11min 21sec (681 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 23 2016