Intonation is very important when playing the slide. The guitar is a tampered instrument, which means we have frets. And, when we press down on a fret, we pretty much know what note we are going to hear. Take for example the 4th fret of the G string. If I press down on the 4th fret of the G string, I know that that pitch will be D.
Now with the slide, we no longer have that luxury. We can see the frets but we do not use them anymore. We just use them as a guide so we have to play directly on top of the fret. This is a very important point with the slide. We play directly on top of the frets in order to achieve the pitch.
So what we are going to do for our first exercise is we are going to take a G blue scale on the G string and we are going to play the note without the slide. We are going to try and find the note with the slide. So if we take the G string, the first note of the G blue scale could be the open G string. Following this, we can play B flat on the third fret of the G string. If I fret that note, I am going to fret here. This is known as the third fret even though I am playing in between the frets.
Now let us try and find that note with the slide. So I am playing directly on top of the fret wire on the third fret in order to achieve that pitch which is normally found by pressing down in between the second and the third fret. Moving on, the next note of the scale is C, we can play C on the 5th fret of the G string and with the slide. The next note on the 6th fret, D flat followed by D on the 7th fret, F on the 10th fret, G on the 12th fret. So try and get the hang of finding the correct pitch of the note with the slide.
Our first exercise, we use the G blue scale. So let us go check out with the backing track and then we will come back and talk about it.
Now, let us take a look at that solo. This uses the G blue scale all on the G string. We are trying to really nail the intonation. So I am starting of on the G string and then playing the third fret to the 5th fret. Now, without the slide, these pitches will sound like this. And with the slide will sound like this. From this point, we are going to play the 7th fret of the G string two times. Now we are going to slide up into the 5th fret, 3rd fret to the open string.
Now we are going to play 5, 6, 7 on the G string up to the 10th fret back to the 7th, 10,12,7. Now we are going to repeat that but we are going to have a slightly different ending. So I will stop when we get to the new ending. I will play everything that you should already know up to this point.
Okay, now the new part, we are going to slide 10 up to 12 on the G string. I will strike the G string one more time. Okay so here is the whole example.
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