How to Turn an Acoustic Into a Slide Guitar

Video Transcript

" Hi! I'm Ed Dowling from eddowling.com. I'm here to talk about how to take a regular old guitar and turn it into a slide guitar on behalf of expertvillage.com. We're going to try to do this in 2 or 3 minutes. Let's see if we can do it. This is an old Hagstrom string guitar. The strings are a little high, but we're going to put a new nut on here. This has a very slight arch in the front port. I'm going to take this nut and put another one in that's straight across, which will allow the slide to work a lot better. Here we go. Now don't try this at home until you get a guitar and string-winder like this. Come on now. That ought to do it. Sling this thing. By removing the old nut, it just comes right out. There. Well I should have removed the last string. Come on. There we go. Put this one in place. Here we go. The essence of this conversion is to raise the strings and make them flat across the top to give the slide an even surface to be on. We're almost done. We've taken a regular acoustic guitar that maybe had high action and replaced the nut with one that's higher and straight across. The ultimate conversion would also have us taking this out and replacing it with one that was a little higher and also straight across. This has very little arch in it and the strings are more compliant down here so I've left that out. Find yourself a nice dreadnought guitar with a neck that's been bent. You can get them for 50 or 80 bucks. It's not playable, and still go through the trouble of putting this nut on that keeps the strings level and if possible, put a new saddle on that keeps the string flat. It'll help in the contact of the slide for the strings. "