Slide Guitar: Warm Up Exercises
Slide is a different beast when it comes to playing guitar. Often it is played in a variety of alternate tunings, which totally throws off a lot of the shapes and patterns that standard tuning uses. In addition to being a tricky thing to do without making too much buzzing and rattling, it is also important to apply the tonality of the major, minor and pentatonic variations to slide. One trick to compensate for this is to begin to think more linearly. Here are a few exercises to help make that happen. They can be done in any tuning, standard or open. Practice sliding from an open ringing note to the 12th fret. This requires the ability to “drop in” on the already ringing open note. Be careful not to mute the open note when applying the slide and try to minimize the knocking sound as you put the slide upon the strings. Try to play cleanly and with the best intonation possible. (If notes buzz or rattle, use one of the fingers behind the slide to dampen the strings.) Once this is fairly ea