“Many guitarists are wary of getting into slide playing. This is a great way to dive in”: How to play slide guitar in standard tuning

A chief consideration when playing with a slide is the tuning. Many of our favorite slide players – Elmore James, Duane Allman, Johnny Winter, Derek Trucks – play slide almost exclusively in an open tuning, such as open E or G.

One great benefit of using an open tuning is that you can lay the slide across the strings at a given fret and sound a pleasing major chord.

But when playing slide in standard tuning, you don’t have that luxury and lose access to some of those familiar sounds. As a result, more attention and care is necessary in order to avoid unwanted sounds. You have to go “peckin’” to find the right ones!

Therein lies the compromise: standard tuning limits your options for sounding groups of strings together, but you retain all your familiar chord shapes and scale patterns, and you still can play a few sweet-sounding two- and three-note chords. In this way, playing slide in standard tuning is the best of both worlds.

For the Blackberry Smoke song Free on the Wing (Like an Arrow, 2016), which features Gregg Allman, I chose to play slide in standard tuning, albeit with my 6th string tuned down to D (drop-D tuning).

Doing this enables me to play a solid rhythm part throughout the track, and when it’s time for the slide parts, I use both hands to deliberately mute strings I’m not playing on at any given moment, so that only the “right” notes ring out.

The two key elements of slide playing are muting and intonation (pitch centering), and standard tuning raises the challenge for both a little bit more.

Blackberry Smoke's Charlie Starr: Tips for playing slide in standard tuning - YouTube

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Free on the Wing opens with a beautiful D7/D9 keyboard part. Figure 1 illustrates the chord shapes, and Figure 2 shows how the part is played.

To ”answer” the keyboards, I play a vocal-like melody with a slide, as shown in Figures 3 and 4.

I prefer to use hybrid picking when playing slide, combining flatpicked downstrokes with fingerpicking. Duane Allman, Derek Trucks and Warren Haynes strictly fingerpick when playing slide, but I like the versatility of having the sound of fingerpicking augmented with the sound of the pick.

The slide solo comes out of the bridge section, illustrated in Figure 5. Drop-D tuning enables me to barre the power chords on the bottom two strings in measures 1 and 2, after which I jump to the slide solo, which is played over the repeating progression C - G/B - G - D - C - G - D.

As I do with the slide parts earlier in the tune, I play the solo in a very vocal-like manner, phrasing as deliberately and precisely as possible. Throughout the solo, I’m careful to sound only one note at a time as I mute the surrounding strings.

Many guitarists are wary of getting into slide playing because of these challenges, and starting in standard tuning or drop-D is a great way to dive in. Give it a shot! You’ll be surprised and delighted by the many great sounds you can discover and create.

• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.