Slide Guitar...

IvisonGuitars

Right,

Looking for tips, tricks, hints, tunings for a total newbie to Slide guitar. I've got a cheap glass slide from some magazine years ago and all I can really do with it is make the strings buzz against the frets and get a load of unwanted overtones from the other strings.

I play Americana/Country/Roots as apposed to Blues.

In my head I want to be Derek Trucks but in my hands i'm Derek Trotter.....

So, how do you do it?

Jimbro66

Until you have plenty of experience of slide playing put heavier strings than normal on your guitar and raise the action a bit. It might then need a truss rod tweek.

To reduce overtones drag the other finger(s) lightly on the strings behind the slide. Not a hard-and-fast rule but playing with your fingers rather than a pick allows you to mute strings that you don't want to sound. This is pretty essential if playing slide in standard tuning.

munckee

I'm no master in slide but found it easier to tune to open D tuning, practice some basic riffs, (I used dust my broom by Elmore James) to get the technique of muting behind the slide and then transpose to standard tuning.

I think I used this as a starter

slacker

Brass slide for beginners

Teyeplayer

Give up on slide and buy a pedal steel, you’ll find you are getting better results more quickly with less frustration...you may also find your slide playing has improved no end when you return to guitar.

pumkin

I found the Sonny Landreth lessons on Truefire are really useful ... think it titled Slide Supernatural.... he gives lots of info on turnings techniques etc and is a great teacher....Truefire do a free months subscription ....( you've probably come across them anyway ) ... he also uses a cheap Dunlop glass slide aswell!!! i found that an Origin Cali helps aswell ...

Gulliver

Here are my tips from my slide journey:

1) muting is super important.  use your other fingers behind the slide for muting, and good right hand muting is equally important.
2) you need a light touch with the slide. heavier strings and higher action will help, but that's a ballache if you're used to a low-ish action on 9s and only want occasional slide.
3) try to play licks you already know, with a slide.  recycle your existing vocabulary to get used to playing slide - then start incorporating the slide in more ways.
4) Slide vibrato is difficult to get sounding right, but when you've got it - it's lovely.

HPhillipsmusic

I find slide a constant game of give and take, and the only advice I would give my younger, Trucks-obsessed self is just to give it time and not give up. I think if you go too far into the slide rabbit hole early on then you'll do the flatwound thing, higher action, open tunings - and then after an afternoon or two of failing miserably you might give up and forget about it. So my advice is slightly different I think just buy the lightest glass slide you can and just get used to the sensation and the light touch needed. Flat wounds help a lot, higher action help a lot, a higher nut helps too, a compressor pedal really helps. But these things aren't going to do much without just spending proper time doing it.

I improved so much more once I stopped caring and just played slide at every opportunity on every guitar i could get my hands on, now 80% of the playing I do for a full time touring band is slide on a low action, round wound strung 335. 

In the studio I regularly find that adding straight electric guitar can clutter a mix with lots of mids, but slide almost always finds its own frequency out of the way of vocals, other guitars, etc. It's really a great string to your bow! 

If you're used to and comfortable with open tunings then give them a go, but I'd suggest just getting used to slide in normal tuning rather than trying to master 2 things at once. Just head down to any pub jam nights or open mics and force yourself to use the slide only - even though you'll feel the urge to just blast a straight blues solo to show these fools whats up, just resign yourself to sounding like a beginner and quickly you'll find some lines on the slide that sound OK and you can build on. Just don't go too hard on yourself and burn out on it! Give yourself a year to get the hang of it. 

Trucks plays with a low action, light strings, and I believe round-wound! Best of luck, let us know how you get on.