Tuning Techniques for Dobro Slide Guitar

Series Summary

Popularized by the blues men of old, with its slow, soulful sighing, slide guitar has since made inroads with several musical genres, including country and good ol' rock and roll. Artists like John Fahey, Robert Randolph and Leo Kottke have taken the style to another level of technical excellence and energy, often playing fast and loud, pushing the boundaries of acoustic slide guitar.

Playing Dobro guitar involves using a slide made of steel or brass to sound notes on the fretboard, instead of the traditional method of pressing down with the fingers. In these free online guitar lessons on video, learn techniques to play acoustic slide guitar music. Our expert will show you the ins and outs of this unique style of playing, including choosing slides and strings, using finger picks, and how to properly apply the slide to the guitar. He will also show you some advanced techniques that will help you to take your slide guitar playing as far as you are willing to go. Look for the lessons on alternate and open string tunings to experiment with different guitar chords and sounds.

Video Transcript

" Hi! I'm Ed Dowling from eddowling.com. I'm here to talk about tuning in general for open tunings, uses of tuners for expertvillage.com. In the old days, people used the pitch pipe or if there was 3 or 4 people around, they would all just agree on what note was E if there was no tuner at all. From there, by agreeing on a note you can tune a guitar by knowing the relationships . In this tuning, which is open G, it's going to be to get to this D to make a G note, which is the next one. I can fret the fifth fret and get an approximation of what the next note should be. Now, to get the next note in this tuning, I go up to the 7th fret and so and so, and so on and so forth. I go the 5th fret now, the 4th fret, and now I believe the 3rd fret. Nobody's doing this anymore. Everybody uses a tuner. This is a good tuner but it's not chromatic. It only has the major notes; it doesn't have some of the notes I'm needing even for this tuning here. You'll usually find a few notes on there that you'll trust. In this case, open G. The D string stays the same as constant tune. What you do is you take your handy tuner here either plug you guitar in or let the microphone pick up the note until it say in this case D a D note. The G note actually is a true G note so I can tune that one too. If you are going to go and buy a tuner these days and you know you are going to play a opening tune a chromatic tuner it gives you all the notes which include the sharps and flats it makes it very easy to tune any tuning. You don't really need it if you have a few notes "