Slides & Steels for Dobro Slide Guitar

Video Transcript

" Hi! I'm Ed Dowling from eddowling.com. I'm here to talk about the slides and steels for dobro and slide guitar on behalf of expertvillage.com. A guitar or dobro played in open tuning with the strings raised, which is think is the right way to do it. You have couple of ways to fret these strings. Hey, here's a tuning fork. Almost anything will work. There's a guy I saw doing a whole act, he ended up playing slide guitar with a rubber chicken. For dobro, the traditional steel is called a steel. It's made out of steel. This is where the term steel guitar came from. It's held between the thumb and middle finger with the index finger in this little groove. Now, there are bullet shaped steels, but they're usually all held the same way. There are a little ungainly unless you use them all the time. One of the reasons for doing this is that the strings are dampened by the middle finger. So in use, we're trying to keep everything but the slide from touching the string. And if we want to dampen a note or a chord, this would be the fill or the damp when other people are playing. You also find the end of this steel, which would be rounded so you can cover and uncover string. I find this thing very ungainly. If you use them for a year or two, you can probably get pretty good at it. The traditional slide is a chunk of glass. This is a glass tube. This is from the music store. Notice my whole finger goes in. This is for the index finger, and this is my backup slide. It has a slightly glissy. My preference is brass tube. This is a split brass tube. I made it myself. It doesn't come off. I have complete control and I can damp all day long. Alright. Another slide guitar traditionally made from a bottle neck., whhile it has to be kept in a Grigri bag, and this is one is usually worn on one of the smaller fingers and played like this. I'm not dealing in that. And of course, the last one is the plastic tube that the slide came in. Never mind the last one. This is Ed Dowling. "