How to Play Slide Guitar: Hammer Ons

Video Transcript

"I'm Reno McCormick and I'm here to tell you about playing the Dobro today. Now the pull-offs and hammer-ons. We use the end of our barre, the tip of our barre we want to pull off a D string. We tilt our barre, we pick the string, and then we pull it back towards us not as exaggerated as I did. So you can sit and you can practice that over and over until you can do it cleanly. You have your, remember at the beginning, we stuck our fingers on there to dampen the strings. So we always have them, when we pull, we pull our fingers off at the same time. On and off. Hammer-ons, the opposite of pull-off. We put our barre on at exactly the same time as we put our fingers on. Here's what it sounds like if I don't use my fingers. You get all these overtones, and we need to kill all the other stuff that's come before, so we use our fingers. Hammer-ons and pull offs. So we can do... which leads us to the next, which is slides. This is what sets the Dobro apart from other instruments. We can slide, we can hammer-on, we can pull-off, we can play single notes, we can play double-styles. We can play chords, mostly major chords, if we need a seventh chord...that's the hard part is coming up with different variations of the regular chords that we need to use."