How to Play Slide Guitar: Open Chords

Video Transcript

"I'm Reno McCormick and I'm here to tell you about playing the Dobro today. So, we're playing Dobro but it's not our turn to play lead. What are we going to do; we're going to play chords. If we're in G, we can play open G here; we use our frets only for guides, to tell us where we're at on the neck. At the twelfth fret is another G chord so we can play our G chord here. But we aren't always in G, are we, we need a C, fifth fret, go to C. We want our barre just over that fret. Use your ear to tell you, if you're on it, and I go open, well, that wasn't a C was it? So there's our D chord. So we have G, C, D, G, G, C, D, G. Now, sometimes we need an A. Oh, there's an A. Now what are we going to do with those chords? We're going to play - we can do this. Hear how that sounded with my hand way up here? We really don't want to play too much with our picks up here, we get too many tones. We don't want that much tone. We want to stay back here by the bridge and get a nice sound. What I just did there was a pinch, I used my thumb and my finger. So what do I have? I had these are called double stops, when you hit two notes at the same time. Fiddlers do it a lot."