Slide

Hi fellow twangers. Nothing much to report from my neck of the woods. I did have a pleasant experience yesterday though: I heard an mp3 of a tune I wrote years ago -- Affairs of the Heart -- sung by fellow Canadian Suzie Vinnick, who I'd met over the Internet. She'll be releasing it on her new CD "33 Stars". Check her out at http://www.suzievinnick.com and have a listen to the sample. It's a wonderful feeling hearing someone else's rendition your own tune. She has a great voice and fell and really nailed it. The version I sent to her (and an instrumental version) can be heard at: http://mp3.com/kirklorange

As you must know by now, I love slide guitar. I've been fooling with it since '67 or so, and it still does it to me. It really is the neatest way of coaxing music from a guitar and if, like me, you like a challenge, then have a go at slide. No form of guitar playing is easy, and all require countless hours to perfect, but slide is probably the most daunting of all. There is only one point where the slide meets the string, and you have to be able to control that point down to the width of a hair. I've dedicated so much of my time to it that I've become good enough at it for producers to hire me to play on their albums, soundtracks and commercials. In fact, I'm being flown to Sydney next week for a new "Bridgestone Tyres" ad campaign being made.

I'm not a purist when it comes to slide. I don't open tune my guitar. Many years ago I decided there were enough open tuned slide players out there already, all sliding up and down to the same inversions, chasing the same licks and riffs. I'd put so much effort into learning my fretboard in standard tuning, I figured there must be a way of finding usable chunks of music that lined themselves up for the slide (and I was right). I've been chastised over the years by those who say that the tradition must be upheld, that it's blasphemy to play slide in standard. What nonsense! It's just the the Music hat counts.

Naturally, in standard tuning, there are no positions where the notes of a chord line up across the six strings. Four-string spans are as big as it gets in standard, and using a shorter -- more comfortable -- slide is possible, allowing the other fingers to move more freely. This is where the fun begins: combining normal playing with the slide. This has become "my thing". When I've got my own gear, and I've got a slide on my pinkie, I feel like my Stratocaster is an orchestra. I can play normal rhythm, I can melodic lines with my fingers AND/OR slide, I can shimmer chords with the slide to sound like a bank of violins, I can answer my fretted licks with slide licks. It truly does expand your musical capabilities by triple at least, not to mention the fun.

I keep mentioning standard tuning... in fact, several years after I started playing in standard, I tried lowering the bass E string to D, and I never tuned it back up. This is called dropped D tuning, or drop D, and it's the best of both worlds. The fifth sandwiched between the two root notes down there on the bottom end comes in real handy. It's the dreaded power chord, and it can sound real mean when slid. I love the tuning so much (and loathe continuous tuning on stage) that I just leave it like that all the time.

I have posted quite an extensive lesson at my site (http://www.lorange.kirk.net), which goes into the finer points of the technique, and describes the tuning in "fretscapes". As I touched on earlier, playing slide requires notes to line up across so that the slide can make contact with them at the same time. I posted a Major fretscape, and a minor fretscape. If you can mentally adapt each of them to their 12 different positions (one for each key), then you'll know where everything is: major, minor, major seventh, minor seventh, seventh, augmented, diminished, suspended fourth... they're all there.

The most important factor in getting a good sound is MASS. By that, I mean that your strings should be heavy, and your slide should be heavy. Lots of mass. Light slides and thin strings give a weak, mosquito like sound. Why? Because, at a microscopic level, the vibrating string wins the battle and rattles the slide right off the string and the note dies. Heavy slides allow the string to ring on because it makes solid contact with the slide. The slide itself absorbs some of the vibrations and "rings". You can feel it. Heavy strings also have more mass, therefore more volume and tone, and their tightness makes for good sliding. I string my old Strat 16 - 16 - 26W - 34 - 44 - 54, or thereabouts. The 16 on the top, which is really a B string tuned up to E, solved all my high end playing years ago. It's a great trick. Lots of mass.

As usual, I'll plug my book PlaneTalk, the comic strip conversation which reveals the "trick" to keeping track of music in standard tuning, the visualization technique which allows you to "see" the music stretched out for the whole length of the fretboard. I've been sending it out to the World for 5 years now, thanks to the Internet. I could go on, but I'll just let you read a message sent to me last week (you'll have to take my word that it's authentic):

"Kirk, I was blown away by the information in your system. I have been playing for thirty years and I literally have learned more in the last weekend than I have since I began playing in 1972! Awesome. Thank You!"

It's true!

All the best, twangin' on,

Kirk
http://www.lorange.kirk.net
http://www.guitarforbeginners.com
http://www.mp3.com/kirklorange