Slide/bottleneck guitar can evoke flavors ethereal and lyrical or aggressive and bombastic. From Santo & Johnny’s “Sleepwalk” to Elmore James’ “Dust My Broom” and on to Debashish Bhattacharya’s Indian slide musings, this approach delivers a wide spectrum of sounds, emotions, and cultural touchstones.
If you watch the hands of guitarists who play with enviable speed and fluidity, you may notice how little effort they seem to exert. Their finger movements are relaxed and minimal, considering the amount of music they are generating. What they’re playing is surely not easy, but it looks that way. So how does a guitarist achieve that state of grace?
Bringing together elements of early popular and country music, swing jazz, blues, and rural dance hall traditions, Western swing is pure vintage American music.
Because one of the things that makes something “easy” on the guitar is the presence of open strings, let’s see how many standard-tuning open-string notes can be found in flat keys.
Bored of soloing with the major scale or the minor pentatonic? Looking for something new to help expand your musical palette? The Mixolydian mode might just be the thing. This mode can be a great tool for improvising in blues, jazz, rock, or practically any other style.
Whatever style you prefer—and regardless of whether you’re more of a soloist or accompanist—you should learn how to get these techniques under your fingers.
Have you ever improvised using a tried-and-true scale—only to hit a note that just doesn’t sound right once a chord change comes along? Here’s a remedy for this common problem: By targeting the notes of a given tune’s chord progression, you can create solos that sound more copacetic.
As you practice your scales, it’s good to remind yourself of the function of the individual notes of those scales. Here we start with open-position scales taken from the chord progression for "Autumn Leaves."
