Tip: Instant Slide Guitar Setup

The action on a properly set up guitar—acoustic or electric—is simply too low to endure good slide playing. You get the best, solid, rattle-free tone if you can bear down on the strings some, and doing this with low action usually results in having the slide coming into contact with the fretwire, producing an ungodly rattle—a no-no in most slide situations (although the occasional rattle is authentic-sounding, especially in blues).

Nuts To You

Good slide tone requires a high action, and there's an easy solution that involves no adjustments to your neck or bridge: buy a slide guitar extension nut, like the ones sold by Stewart MacDonald (www.stewmac.com). In one of the last best deals ever, you can buy an extension nut for under $4.00 ($3.64, at last price check). It's just an angled hunk of metal with six grooves in it to accommodate the strings, but it works brilliantly (see Fig. 1).

Fig. 1. The extension nut from Stewart MacDonald is ingeniously simple, but works wonders.

Fig. 2. The extension nut fits over your existing nut, and is held in place by the tension of the strings bearing downward.

Fig. 3. Once you have the nut installed and your strings tuned up, you'll notice the action is considerably higher—too high for fretting, but ideal for slide.

Just take any guitar, acoustic or electric, loosen the strings, and place the extension nut over your existing nut. When you tune back up, the pressure of the tightened strings will hold the extension nut in place, so you don't need to do anything more permanent to your guitar to keep it set up for slide (see Fig. 2). It means you can reclaim your guitar at any time to resume normal playing.

Notice that once you have the nut in place, the guitar's action is considerably higher (see Fig. 3). It's no longer possible to play the guitar in the normal fretted way, so you may want to consider dedicating a spare guitar specifically for playing slide.

Slide Technique

Fig. 4. You can play lap style while standing, if you tuck your right arm under the strap, as Dobro player Chris Stockwell does.

Now you're ready to play. If you're really serious about playing acoustic slide, you might consider taking one more step and buying a straight saddle to replace your existing curved one. (You can buy blank saddle stock from Stew-Mac, too.) Before you buy, you have to measure your bridge slot width and then order appropriately. I've done this slide conversion technique on several guitars, and while the saddle replacement helps, I don't find it absolutely necessary, especially if you'll be playing single-note work. (Having the strings all at the same height, which the saddle provides, works well for chordal playing.)

Once you've got the extension nut on, and are tuned up, what do you do? The next step is to decide whether you'd like to play normally, with the waist of the guitar resting on your right leg, or lap style. There are advantages to both, but I recently adopted lap style, as it helped me see the fingerboard a little better, and it forced me out of my usual fretted-playing habits. Also, I found it easier to bear down on the strings with gravity on my side. (Remember, we're talking about getting a good tone by pressing down on the strings more, which the raised action allows.) If you're recording and sitting down, it's a little easier to play lap style than live and standing up, but you can configure your strap to play flat, too, by lengthening it slightly, and tucking your right arm through the strap (see Fig. 4).

Opening Up To Different Tunings

To get the hang of moving around your guitar with a slide, I suggest staying in standard tuning while you perfect the technique of using the slide, the right-hand fingers to sound notes (slide guitar is rarely played with a pick), and generally trying to get a sound that doesn't sound like sick kittens mewing. Try to play simple chord passages, moving the bar in a I-IV-V fashion by barring the inside three strings (the D, G, and B) and playing a simple right-hand pattern. Then move to simple lead melodies. Use your remaining left hand fingers to mute the strings behind the slide.

Once you can play this new way without sounding really bad, you might consider switching to an open tuning, such as open G (D, G, D, G, B, D, low to high) or open D (D, A, D, F#, A, D, low to high). The tunings of open A and open E correspond to these tunings, too, because the relative relationship of the strings remains the same. Since you usually play slide by barring straight across, tuning the guitar to an open chord seems to offer the easiest way to play licks. Certain players, though, like Warren Haynes, try to stay in standard tuning as much as possible, because you don't have to readjust your thinking to play—especially on improvised leads.

It's A Slide, Slide World

I realized that the reason I wasn't inspired to play more slide is because it just sounded so bad on a normal guitar. Then I was messing around with a square-neck Dobro and a Stevens bar in a music store one day, and I sounded better in five minutes than in years of attempts on my normal guitars at home. And the solution cost less than $10 (the price of the extension nut and a glass slide from Dunlop). With these two items, you can be well on your way to creating music you didn't even know you were capable of playing.

Jon Chappell has written five books in the For Dummies series (Wiley Publishing), as well as The Recording Guitarist: A Guide for Home and Studio (Hal Leonard), Digital Home Recording (Backbeat Books), and Build Your Own PC Recording Studio (McGraw-Hill).

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