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- Hi, my name is Elizabeth Moen,
and I'm here with Fender Technique of the Week
to talk to you about beginner slide guitar
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If anything like me,
you've been a little intimidated, by slide for a long time,
and it took you awhile to get here.
But, you are here.
I'm here now and that's what counts.
So, yeah, I'm just gonna talk to you
a little bit about my technique, how I got into slide
and, a little bit of tips that I might have.
Never one tip.
Please continue listening to this video till the end,
but, if you're gonna leave soon,
just know that just practice, just practice,
just get comfortable, messing up.
Slide is such a high risk, high reward sort of sound.
And, it takes just a lot of practice,
and getting comfortable messing up less.
I guess, that's what practice does,
it helps you mess up less?
Let's talk about how I got into slide, I guess.
During the pandemic,
I was just at home just kinda messing around on my guitar
and I found some just like bottles and things in my room.
And, I was curious how to get that sound.
I've been listening to a lot of music,
with Slide guitar featured in it.
And, so, yeah, just pick it up glass bottles,
just kinda of putting them on the strings,
seeing how that sounded, how that felt.
And, then I started drenching the sound and reverb.
I really think that slide, has such a beautiful tone,
but there's so much you can do with slide
with your effects and with your amp.
I personally drench it in tremolo and reverb,
and play through this beautiful amp right here.
But, yeah, that's just kinda the beauty of Slide,
is the tone and the versatility of it.
It's not just one certain thing.
Speaking of tone, speaking of different tones,
there's also many different tones
you can get from many different slides.
There are typically two different kinds of slides.
There's the metal kind and the glass.
I prefer the glass ones, they have more of like a mellow
kinda of like softer, warmer tone.
And, yeah, I started out with, you know,
kinda of some bigger ones like this.
You can use really any finger you want to use.
You know, I started out with my middle finger
and, then eventually moved to my ring finger.
And, then eventually I got this one
and this is my favorite one,
because when I put it on my pinky finger,
it has a bit of like a curve to it,
so, I can still bend my pinky.
What I recommend for slides,
is getting something that has a little bit of wiggle room,
but not too much, so, that way your finger
isn't actually sliding in the slide,
but it's not so tight that, it's just uncomfortable.
So, we've talked about different kinds of slides,
and, now, yeah, I wanna talk about slides
with the guitar itself on the neck.
I am playing through this Telecaster.
Telecasters are for slide guitar,
and why it's so great for playing Slide,
and especially slide for beginner.
And, for someone who wants to go back and forth
from slide to regular guitar.
It's not so low of an action
that when you press down with the slide,
it's gonna just like instantly hit the neck
and make kinda of like 'ghururu' noise.
But, it's also not so high
that when you're playing regularly,
it's not gonna hurt to press down too much.
With slide guitar, there are two very important things
to think about when you're playing.
And, that is again, the pressure of how hard
you wanna actually press down to get the tone.
Cause if you don't press down hard enough,
it's not really gonna make the noise.
If you press down too hard, it's gonna hit the actual neck
and make kinda of, you know, not a fun noise.
A thing about slide that is different from regular playing,
is instead of playing in between the frets,
you actually want to play directly on the fret.
So, right on the line.
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You know, that's on pitch but,
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if you go even slightly, too far down, it's flat.
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Slightly too up high, it's sharp.
And, then a fun thing about slide,
and why it's called slide is because you can slide
from note to note.
I think my favorite
and, a lot of other people's favorite part
about slide is hearing that
♪ waahwaah ♪
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So, I've been talking a bit about, you know,
what to do with your hand that is playing on the neck,
left hand for me.
But, also important to talk about your strumming hand,
your picking hand, my right hand,
your hand, whatever hand you use.
So, I like to, I don't use a pick,
that's my technique, that's what I prefer.
So, I use my thumb to mute these strings that I'm not using.
So, it's because the slide is, pretty big,
it can hit a lot of, the strings,
and typically, at least for me,
I only want to be hitting one,
sometimes two strings at a time.
And, because I'm also a beginner,
I feel the most comfortable with the high E and the B string
and the more comfortable I get,
the more strings I actually start to play.
So, for now I recommend just muting
these top four with your thumb.
And, then, I use the pointer finger on the B string
and my middle finger on the E string,
and, then, I can go back and forth.
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Yeah, a fun part about not using a pic when playing slide,
is you can kinda of do
some finger picky stuff with the slide.
That's one of my favorite things to do with slide.
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You might've noticed right there,
that I also, like, I do this a bit.
I kinda of like wiggle my finger,
that gives it kinda of like this natural sort of tremolo.
I am using tremolo right now through a pedal,
but, I also like to do that.
It kinda gives a little character.
So, I've been talking a lot about my technique,
why I like to do the things I do with slide,
but I want to explain it with a song.
This is actually the first song,
I've ever released with slide.
There's a slide solo at the end of it.
And, I wanna show you that
and, again, it's a beginner slide song,
cause I'm a beginner slide player.
So, on the B string,
I like to go, five, eight, seven, ten, eight.
And, then the more comfortable I get,
I'll go five, eight, ten, seven.
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♪ Five eight ten seven ♪
♪ eight ten eight ♪
♪ ten eight ♪
♪ five eight ten eight seven ♪
♪ ten eight ♪
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And, so, yeah, sometimes I would just do the B string
or just do the E string at the end.
But, sometimes I like to do both at the same time
in the recording, they're actually, multiple versions
of this melody playing at the same time.
And, yeah, that's because I liked the different things
that I ended up doing the more comfortable I got.
How I found that melody is the end of the song
is just a C chord and then a D seven and then F
and then back to a C.
And, yeah, that's how I started
to really get comfortable practicing slide,
I think it's important to practice it on its own.
So, you can just really focus on,
not being too flat or sharp,
just getting comfortable,
really hearing what you're doing.
But, then I just started like going on garage band
and looping rhythm guitar, and then just playing over it.
And, that's actually how this song came to be.
It's like, really liked those chords,
and, then, I started playing and I thought of that
♪ Papapapa paratatata ♪
So, that is the riff, that's how to play the riff.
Well, I, so I like to play the riff,
and I'm gonna play along with the song now,
hopefully if you want to play long too,
eventually you play with the song.
I hope you liked the song.
My name is Elizabeth Moen.
Thank you so much for being here today.
Thanks for listening.
Learning something new, trying something out.
That's pretty cool.
Yeah, have a great rest of your day or night,
whatever time you're watching this, have a good one.
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