Acoustic Slide Guitar - Blues Slide Guitar

In a previous lesson we had a look at the basic techniques of playing slide guitar on the acoustic. Today I would like to dig into this style of playing a little deeper by looking at some blues slide guitar.

A lot of slide guitar playing is done in open tunings as it allows you to execute chords with a straight bar. This is very useful when using a slide as you can play your bar chords within a single fret.

However, in this lesson I want to show you how to approach blues on your guitar with a slide in a standard tuning. While there are some limitations playing this way, it still sounds great and is convenient, as you don’t need to alter your tuning every time you want to play slide guitar. 

If you want to get into slide guitar playing more, then definitely check out open tunings.

Blues Slide Guitar In Standard Tuning

Check out the chord shape below:

This is a root 5 bar chord shape in the positions for G, C, and D, and it is going to form the basis of a little slide guitar blues piece that we are going to play in the key of G. 

The notes that I have highlighted in red form the shape you will target with your slide. These notes are going to be easy to play with your slide because they all fall within the one fret.

Here is this shape laid out across a 12 bar blues in G. This is very important for you to play as it will be the foundation on which we will build our slide blues piece. It will help you visualize where this shape needs to be at any given point within our blues in G:

Remember that when playing slide guitar on your acoustic you need to place the slide directly over the fret you are targeting. Also, keep in mind all the things we spoke of with slide guitar technique in an earlier lesson on this topic. 

Blues Slide Riffs On G

Here are some blues slide riffs based on this shape for the G chord:

In the example above I am targeting the top two strings of our shape at the 12th fret. Remember that the slide needs to play directly over the fret, not between them. Therefore I start this riff by placing my slide directly over the 11th fret before sliding it up to be directly over the top of the 12th fret.

This next slide riff makes use of double stops (ie. playing two notes at the same time):

In the second bar of this slide riff, our shape is moving down chromatically from the 12th to 10th fret. This is a very common move in blues slide guitar playing. 

Here is one more riff for the G chord:

Notice that in this riff I target our shape at the 3rd fret before finishing up at the 12th. The 3rd fret is also a great place to target this shape to get some very cool sounding blues riffs over the G chord when playing slide on your acoustic.

Blues Slide Riffs On C And D

The great thing about having just one shape to target for our blues slide piece, is that the same riffs we did on G will work for C and D at the 5th and 7th positions respectively. Try it.

Lets create some other riffs over these chords for now though. We want to build variety after all.

Here is a blues slide guitar riff for the C chord:

and here is one for the D chord:

Take note that when targeting this shape, as we have throughout for our slide blues, we are not restricting ourselves to only the notes within that shape. There are notes that are played outside too, as is the case for the C and D riffs above. 

Always see these “outside” notes in relation to the shape when you play them, as it will help greatly when you want to take these ideas and use them in other musical situations.

Slide Guitar Blues In G

Finally, lets take these ideas and create our slide blues piece in G. Listen to it and compare it back to the beginning of the lesson when we were just targeting the shape for each chord with the slide:

What a difference a few simple riff ideas can make!

Work your way through this slowly. Isolate each riff so you can really get it down and always listen carefully to the audio as a reference.

As always check out great players of this style to continue working on your slide guitar playing. Here are a few to get you started:

• Muddy Waters
• Robert Johnson
• Elmore James
• Duane Allman

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