Blues Slide Guitar

Posted by admin on August 14, 2009

The slide guitar is a term used to describe the action, whereas the bottleneck guitar is a term used to describe the item used to create the slide.
These are often used interchangeably and also may refer to style other than blues – for example country and Hawaiian music also uses the slide technique but not the bottleneck (usually!).

A bottleneck is a traditional glass slide but other materials are used such as brass, steel and ceramic to make slides – each material lends its own characteristics to the tone.

Resonator – Dobro
One of the most popular types of guitar for blues bottleneck is the resonator which has a relatively high action by default which makes playing bottleneck easier. Resonator guitars produce their sound from a metal cone inside the guitar’s body and the term dobro belongs to the company who first made the resonator guitar.

Ordinary acoustics and electric guitars can also be used but it is best to raise the action slightly so that the strings don’t hit the frets when the slide is pressed downwards.

In Between The Frets
The slide can create a more subtle sound when it comes to note “in between” that is notes between the frets which is able to mimic the human voice. The electric guitar is able to do this, to a degree, by bending and pre-bending strings with the use of the volume control to remove the initial percussive sound from the beginning of the note. However, it is very difficult to emulate the sound of a slide.

Many players use both a slide and regular stopped notes with their fingers, using the three remaining fingers to make some of the lower runs etc.

The slide or bottleneck sounds best on the higher sounding strings but more difficult to get a good sound from the low wound strings.

Chords On One Fret
The bottleneck is most effective when it is possible to make a chord on one fret, that is the reason why music in this style usually requires the guitar to be tuned to open tuning  – that is, when you play the open strings a chord is sounded.

Therefore, many songs or pieces require a specific tuning, D & G tuning among the most popular.

Comments

4 Responses to “Blues Slide Guitar”

1. Al says:

   September 13, 2009 at 2:59 pm

   Nice site with good information.
2. Ron from online guitar lessons says:

   September 14, 2009 at 7:59 am

   Great article. very informative. Thanks a lot for that.
3. andy from learnrockguitar says:

   March 16, 2010 at 1:16 am

   I love playing the guitar, Thanks for some great posts and useful info. Will check back for sure
4. Mike says:

   March 21, 2010 at 11:20 am

   I enjoyed reading this post about Blues Slide Guitar. Really interesting. I will come back to visit this blog again.