Chords for Matt Smith Gives A Killer Slide Guitar Lesson - Part 1

[D] _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ [Gb] _ _ [D] _ _
Hi, I'm Matt Smith.
[N] I'm going to talk a little bit about slide guitar.
I've been playing
slide guitar since I was a kid, because to me it's the most human noise you could possibly
make with a guitar.
It's also a truly American style.
That's really something that's wonderful
to do, and can help add [D] another tool to your arsenal of tricks.
What I'm going to do here
is I'm in D tuning.
D tuning.
_ _ _ Basically you [Eb] have from the 6th string to the 5th string,
[D] the 6th string is tuned down to D, [A] 5th string stays at A, 4th string [D] stays at D, the [Gb] 3rd
string is tuned down to F sharp, [A] and then the 2nd string is tuned down to B, and the
1st string is tuned down to [D] A.
[N] Which you can do with your New Planet Waves chromatic tuner,
which you should be having.
Ok, basically what I'm going to do is teach a little bit
about slide guitar.
Slide guitar, basically I use my 3rd finger.
Bonnie Raitt and Lowell
George use their 2nd finger.
Some people even use their 1st finger, some people use their
pinky, and if you're Hound Dog Taylor you have an extra finger over here, and he used
that one.
But right now for the rest of us, I use my 3rd finger.
I don't like the slide
to go past the knuckle, and the secret to playing slide guitar when you're playing,
is just keep your slide straight, parallel to the frets.
What happens is your hand tends
to want to do this, but what you want to do is keep the slide straight.
So the first
thing I would have you do, I usually keep my thumb squarely on the back of the neck,
and then the slide completely parallel to the frets.
Now you want to practice bringing
it up and down the neck, keeping it parallel to the frets so that you don't have any of
this.
Because when you're tuned to an open chord [D] like this, _ it makes it real easy to
play slide.
And [N] the other secret of slide guitar is right hand muting technique.
So
the right hand muting technique is this.
Basically you'll notice most slide guitar
players play with their index finger.
The reason they do that is because these fingers
and the thumb can be used to mute the strings.
If I wanted, for example, if I wanted to mute
just the 3rd string and isolate all the rest of the strings, my thumb goes over the 6th,
5th, and 4th string, and my 2nd and 3rd finger isolates the 1st and 2nd string.
[Gb] So now the
only thing you hear is the 3rd string.
[A] So anytime I want to move that around I use my
fingers and my thumb.
This is just the 5th string.
Just the [Bbm] 2nd string.
_ [A] _ _ So you want to
practice [D] that too because it's really all about right [Gb] hand muting.
That's how you isolate
the strings.
The rest of it is to trust your ears, not your eyes.
Because basically [A] _ [Bb] _ _ [Dm] your _
slide is over the top of the frets.
And when you're playing slide guitar you have infinite
possibilities of being out of tune.
So you really [F] want to keep it so that it's as clean
and as accurate as possible.
Concerning vibrato [Bb] with a slide, _ _ vibrato is always usually done
below the note, not above it.
Here's the note.
Now if I use vibrato that [Eb] goes above and below
it it [Bb] sounds like this.
_ And the note actually sounds sharp to you.
If I played vibrato with
just below and coming back up it sounds like that.
It sounds like in pitch.
_ _ You see how
much better that sounds than this?
_ The note is much more defined.
And basically I use
almost a full fret in width.
And sometimes I'll try to make it like an opera singer.
_ _ _ By delaying the vibrato.
_ _ _ And that's what gives [N] it that real human quality.
_ Basically if you
look at playing slide guitar when you're in an open tuning, here's the 12th fret.
Now
I look at slide guitar like a knight in chess.
And a knight in chess always moves in an L
shape.
So you can start at any defined movement.
I usually use kind of like one fret.
So if
I started at the 11th fret, [Ab] slid up [Bb] to the 12th fret, and then played the first string.
So that's the 11th to 12th fret [Ab] on the second [D] string, and [Bb] then the first string.
I have
an L shaped pattern like this.
That's an L this way.
Now if I did the same thing [Gb] and
then slid to the third string, 11 and [Dbm] 12 on the [Gbm] second string, and then played the third
string, that's an [Bb] L shaped pattern like this.
Now with the slide it sounds like this.
[D] _ _ _ _
_ _ _ Now
the great thing about open tunings is that you can do L shapes on every string.
[Dm] From
the [Bbm] first to the second, [Gbm] _ second, third to second, _ [D] fourth to [Ab] third, fifth to [D] fourth,
_ and with vibrato, because you've got to love vibrato.
So anyway it's like this. _ _ _
_ [Gb] _ _ [D] _ _ [Bbm] _ [D] _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ [Gbm] _ _ [Eb] Now, the
next chord in a blues progression is called a four chord because it relates to the fourth
note of the measure.
Don't let that scare you.
I'm just a self taught lunkhead guitar
player.
So basically that's [G] at the fifth fret.
That would be the four chord of the [B] blues,
and the five chord would [A] be up here at the seventh fret.
_ So I can L shape up to the [N] fourth
fret from the fourth to [Bb] the fifth string.
[Bm] _ _ _ [G] [Db] And also from the sixth to seventh.
_ [A] _ _ _ [Db] And obviously
we need to have a turnaround, otherwise you can never end your blues and you have to play
it over and over again begging your friends to kill you.
So you need to have a turnaround
so you can stop your blues.
So the turnaround we're going to learn on this one is simply
playing the third fret on the fifth string with the first string together simultaneously
with your thumb and middle [D] finger. _
[Bm] _ _ _ [Bb] Then you [D] raise it back one fret, [Eb] so that's fifth [D] string,
third fret.
_ [Gm] Second _ [Bm] fret, fifth string.
[Eb] First fret, fifth string. _
And then open [D] fifth and
open first.
And then you [G] just go [A] five, six, seven, how many pairs of strings you want.
Now here's what it would sound like with a blues.
So [C] one chord is going to be twelfth
fret [Bb] L shapes.
_ [Dm] _ _ [D] _ _
_ _ _ Now _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ fourth to the fifth [Bm] fret.
_ _ [G] _
_ _ [Gb] _ [Bm] _ _ _ [G] _ _
_ [D] _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Sixth to [Dbm] seventh fret [A] now. _ _
_ [D] Fifth to the fourth.
[G] Fourth to fifth.
_ [D] And then _ turnaround. _ _ _ _ _
[Ab] _ [A] _ _ _ Alright?
[D] Now let's tune it up a little bit.
So we're
going to show you one more real cool thing here.
This is what I call the secret Rycuder diagram. _ _ _ _