what started you playing slide?

[resoholic]

i thought this could develop some interesting responses on how and why people started to play slide.
personally i got introduced to the delta blues when i was 14 and i havent stopped loving it since then and this gave me the urge to start playing slide guitar on an old modified electric and the sound that it created was beautiful. then transferring to a resonator made the music sound other-worldly.
so in the end it all comes down to a passion for the blues and wanting to play origional songs and developing my own songs.
i would love to know other peoples stories.
cheers

[thebluesbear( al)]

Hi

Well i got into slide livng in tyneside 20 years ago.....at the time i was a ok electric player but needed to develop more
Gypsy dave smith had not long moved to the uk from amsterdam and i used to see him play his old dobro all about tyneside
So i asked him a few questions and started playing bit by bit since then ,,,,a few years later it became a passion the thing that floated my boat

then i returned to live in Bath where Kevin Brown lives i talked to kevin and got some tips and took all things on board

Still at it and will be for life i think

al

[resoholic]

its an odd feeling isnt it when you have a passion for the blues and slide guitar

[thebluesbear( al)]

Hi
Odd is not the word id choose to use perhaps inspiring,,,, is the word id use

al

[maxxengland]

Can't remember the day I decided it was slide for me, but it goes back to when I started learning guitar 20+ years ago and decided that sod everybody else, this was my direction, it was the sound that was in me, and it was going to be heard. And I think I'm beginning to get the hang of it ;D

[Gerry C]

As I mentioned on the other thread, the first time I saw anyone playing slide was Brian Jones when the Stones had a hit with Little Red Rooster and they were on TV. At the time I'd just taken up the guitar and had a very nasty cheap acoustic made of compressed cardboard - or something very similar ;D - but obviously I needed a slide. My dad, bless him, had an old pair of bicycle handlebars in his shed and he took them into work (he worked at Vickers Armstrongs factory doon by the Tyne man haway like but) and got his mate to cut off the right length, mill it properly so there were no sharp edges and chromium-plate it! Ideal!! Of course it was a few more months until I found out that you needed to have an open tuning to do things effectively. Being a resourceful lad and having been told that "Open E" was great for slide, I tuned my ol' box to EG#BEBE. It actually works quite well, but I've never come across it anywhere else! Perhaps I ought to patent it as Cooper Tuning and charge people like Michael vast sums to use it... I think the first thing I learned to play was (surprise!) Little Red Rooster!

The sad postscript to this came a few years later when I was at college in Liverpool. I was at a folk-club and after my spot a bloke asked if he could borrow my slide to do a number; I duly obliged and of course the SoB never returned it - waltzed out the door when my back was turned. What gutted me was that my dad had died very suddenly a few months earlier and this really quite precious ouvenir of his encouragement and loving care had just gone...

Cheerily,

Gerry C

[Deleted]

Not that I knew it at the time but Ry Cooder got me in to slide playing; Firstly by watching 'Crossroads' 1986 and secondly watching 'Paris, Texas' 1984. Ah the power of a good soundtrack!

[bod]

Funnily enough, although I've enjoyed blues for as long as I can remember and dabbled in guitar off and on for a few decades, and despite a longstanding taste for Son House, Tampa Red, Muddy Waters and others, what finally made me to devote some time to learning slide was this wee beastie:

But not, of course, by any inspired slide work on her part. No. When not dozing on the furniture, this dog has a remarkable capacity for acceleration, which she chose to demonstrate from a standing start by my feet while attached to my hand by an 8 foot lead, whereupon the nice body harness that safeguards her neck from trauma at such times enabled the effective transfer of her full momentum to my suddenly outstretched shoulder... "Ouch", I said (among other stock phrases reserved for such moments) upshot, a very tender shoulder that is aggravated by anything more than a few minutes fretting chords and parts thereof, but which is relatively untroubled by sustained slide use... and there we have it, a new interest comes to the fore.

Strange to tell, I think part of the reason I never tried slide before this was that I had the idea it would be terribly 'ard to do - and I'm sure it is to do it really well - but to my surprise I find the open tunings and sliding much friendlier, much more intuitive, than anything else I've ever tried on guitar, which is nice.

In a recent further twist to this tale, following an improbable bicycle-related accident (not even on the bike, not even out the house, just carrying it into the hall when it all went horribly wrong!) which rebooted the old injury and added some new twists of its own, the physio' had sworn me off all guitar activities for the foreseeable , but earlier today allowed that lap-style playing shouldn't be a problem.... '

Ere we go again, then ... another new interest... quite looking forward to it, actually.

[andys]

The person who really inspired me to play slide was Captain Beefheart (and by default some of the other bands that used him as an influence). I was in a gigging indie band in the mid 1980s, listening to the Good Captains albums with Mr Zoot Horn Rollo's crazed sliding was a revelation. Also at the time there was a bunch of reprobates from Leeds called the Three Johns (Jon Langford still plays and records in Chicago, I think) Jon used a lot of slide. I started to incorporate slide into some of the music at the time, though in standard tuning. Later on I discovered the joys of open tuned acousticplaying after my gigging band days finished, but ironically didnt match up the two till I started having two or three acoustics around. Its funny how I have a bigger guitar collection now, that I did when I was a gigging musician.
What finally clinched it was the acquisition of a lap steel about 16 years ago, from a colleague in a school I worked in. I just fell in love with the sound of steel slide on open tuned strings.

Final and absolute credit for getting me into really playing slide, has to go to my wife Paula, who has always said that she loves the sound of acoustic slide playing, and has always been not only supportive of me collecting and playing guitars, but positively encouraging as well. I think in an ideal world though she'd rather that all my guitars were resonators!!!