How to Play Slide Guitar: How to Use a Bar

Video Transcript

"I'm Reno McCormick and I'm here to tell you about playing the Dobro today. So now we take our bar, we put our first finger across the ridge, take our second finger and put it in the side ridge and take our thumb and put it on this side ridge. And now we're ready to address the Dobro neck. Before we even touch the bar to the neck, we put our fingers on there to dampen the strings. Because otherwise you get this. You get all kinds of static and unwanted noises. So, we put our fingers on the strings, but they're dead now. Now I can lay this where ever I want and I can slide around. There's a little bit of noise but not enough to bother anything. So now we're ready to play. We take our bar, we get our fingers ready to play here, and now we're ready to count off. One, two, three. What I just did was a slide. That's how we do, we use our thumb, is mostly going to do all the lead work. Our fingers are just accessories after the fact. So what did we do? We're playing thumb and bar."