Guitar Techniques: Slides
Lead guitar players, especially in rock music, love to use slide techniques to enhance their solos. There are a couple of ways to slide on a guitar. The slide is a musical embellishment that can be overdone. Incorporating slides into your solos effectively can add color and excitement, while overusing them can indicate a lack of creativity. Finding the right balance for this technique is the key to using guitar slides to enhance your guitar soloing skills.
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Instructions
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Play your favorite guitar lick or solo. As you play, listen for a moment when a slide may be effective. This is often at the end of a musical phrase (series of notes that go together) or when you hit a note you're going to hold out for a bit. When you find that place in the solo, execute a fret finger slide. This is done by sliding away from the last note your finger plays. To do this, keep your finger on the guitar fret and drag it slowly up or down the neck of the guitar, producing a slide sound as your finger passes over several frets. There's no set number of frets you have to include in the slide. It's a matter of feeling when the slide is effective.
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Incorporate a double fret finger slide at the end of a guitar phrase. To do this, quickly slide your finger away from the last note you play, moving up or down the neck. When you lift your finger away at the end of the slide, move back to the position where you began the slide and slide your finger quickly in the same direction you did for the first slide in this series.
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Turn your guitar pick sideways and place the edge of it against one of your strings, down near the body of the guitar. The thickest string typically sounds best. Drag the edge of the pick along the string. This slide is called a pick slide. It's one of the most used slides and can be used to create various sounds. For instance, dragging the pick about halfway up the neck of the guitar, then releasing and immediately starting the slide from the position where you left off can create the sound of a motorcycle changing gears. Vary the speed and pressure of the pick slide to make other sounds.
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