Playing Slide Guitar - Slide Guitar Technique

A great way to play your acoustic guitar is with a slide. Slide guitar playing has a very unique and instantly recognizable sound. The great news is that if you already have basic guitar skills, then it’s not that hard to get some slide guitar into your playing.

Today I would like to show you the technique for playing slide guitar, and then get you started playing your guitar in this way.

Slide Guitar Technique - The Slide

The actual slide itself can go on either the middle, ring or pinky fingers of your fretting hand. I will use the pinky throughout this lesson because I like being able to combine slide guitar playing with normal playing. The pinky is the finger of choice for this as it leaves the other three fingers free.

When playing your guitar with a slide, you need to make sure that you are holding it parallel to the frets. The remaining three fingers (index, middle, and ring) should follow behind the slide touching the strings very lightly. Check out the pictures to the right to see this.

These three fingers behind the slide help dampen unwanted sounds from the strings. Be sure to keep these fingers together, don’t separate them.

Whichever finger you choose to put the slide on, you need to make sure that the slide itself sits above the first knuckle, so that you can still bend your finger. By keeping your fingers behind the slide together, and not separated, you will be able to keep it from slipping down past this knuckle. 

Again, check the pictures for reference.

Slide Guitar Technique - Picking Hand

As far as your picking hand is concerned, you can use either a plectrum or play your slide guitar with a fingerstyle approach. Both will give you a different tone so it’s worth experimenting with.

Whichever you choose, I do both depending on the situation, you will also dampen strings with the fingers of your picking hand when playing slide guitar.  Check out the picture to the right to see what I mean. 

Notice that in the picture, as I go to play the third string of the guitar with my pick and slide, my middle and ring fingers are touching the top two strings, and my thumb is muting out the lower three. Doing this enables me to isolate the sound of the third string on which I am using the slide.

When I move to another string, one of my fingers, or my thumb, will dampen this string to stop it ringing through as I continue playing with the slide.

Here is an example of some slide guitar playing. I will talk about this shortly, but when using a slide, be sure to place it directly over the fret, not in between, when sounding your notes.

Listen to both recordings of this example. In the first one I am not using the dampening technique, and in the second one I am:

I think you can hear the importance of this technique with your slide guitar playing.

It sounds much cleaner using these fingers to dampen the strings.

Slide Guitar Technique - Fretting Hand

The main difference when playing your guitar with a slide is that you play directly over the fret instead of in between the frets as you would normally do. You don’t actually need the frets at all when playing slide guitar, they are just there to guide you. In effect, the slide becomes a moving fret.

You also only need to press very lightly on the string with the slide. A lot lighter than what you would be use to, so take some time to get a feel for this. If you press too hard, you will come into contact with the frets. A guitar with a higher action (ie. distance of string to the fretboard) is generally more suited for slide guitar playing. 

Finally, vibrato is a big part of slide guitar playing. To apply vibrato, simply move your entire hand, as one, from left to right around the note(s) you are playing with your slide. Be sure to keep all fingers of the fretting hand together as explained earlier. The speed and width of your vibrato will be up to you and the feel of the piece you are playing.

Here is an example of vibrato being applied with a slide so you can hear what I mean. Again I have included 2 audio examples. The first one has no vibrato applied while the second one does so you can hear the difference:

Using Your Slide With The Guitar

Here is a simple little blues in G I will leave you with, using our slide. Be sure to keep in mind everything I have told you about slide guitar technique as you work your way through this. I have kept it very simple so that you can focus on the all important fundamentals of slide guitar playing:

Be sure to listen to this piece so you know how it should sound and have fun with it.  

We will dig deeper into the wonderful world of slide guitar in a coming lesson where I will reinforce the things we have covered today and introduce a bunch of new things to you as well.

Make continuous improvement with your acoustic playing with my online lessons for fingerpicking guitar