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 easy, try incorporating vibrato into the same exercise when you reach the 12th fret.
  • Reverse this exercise and slide from the 12th to an open note. Try to to use the velocity from the slide to keep the string ringing when you lift off of the string.
  • Play the major scale on every open string.  Follow the whole-step/ half-step formula of: (W-W-H-W-W-W-H) and play the scale both ascending & descending.
  • Play the minor scale on every open string. Follow the whole-step/ half-step formula of: (W-H-W-W-H-W-W) and play the scale both ascending & descending.
  • Play the minor pentatonic scale on every string. (R-m3-4-5-m7-R) Play the scale both ascending & descending.
  • Play the major pentatonic on every string. (R-M3-4-5-M7-R) Play the scale both ascending & descending.
  • Play the “blues” minor and major scales on every string (same as minor and major pentatonic scales but with added #4 -or b5- note.) Play the scales both ascending & descending.
  •  Explore different rhythms with these scales. Try doubling up notes for 8th notes and then try to double up using a shuffle rhythm (long-short with triplet rhythms.) Try triplets and 16th notes.  Also try to play the scales with various rhythms without doubling or tripling up.


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