SLIDE, CHARLIE BROWN, SLIDE!

Oskar · Joined: Jul 29, 2004 Posts: 1751 Location: Norway

A nice addition to any guitar player's (or even bass player, for that matter) arsenal is grabbing hold of anything that'll make an interesting and/or annoying sound, hold it against the strings and wail.
Me, I'm boring in that respect, so I rarely go beyond the standard open tuning stuff (Open G and Open A for melodic stuff and country blues-ish sounds, Open D and Open E for that wonderfully manic Chicago blues wail), sometimes playing simple melodies and motifs in standard tuning, the latter only on electric, mind you.
I generally keep one electric sort of set up for slide, but I've never bothered with a designated acoustic slide machine.

As you may have gathered, I'm fairly conventional in my playing and approach, so I'd love to hear if there's anybody out there who utilises weird and wonderful artifacts for slides, or maybe some unorthodox tunings, or maybe even some ways of using the slide guitar as a basis for sonic mangling - what about guitar modelers or guitar syntesizers?
Like Delia Smith says:
Let's have you!

Inventor · Posted: Sat Dec 13, 2008 9:04 pm Post subject:

Why funny you should ask! Please refer to the following post which I just posted a moment ago:

http://electro-music.com/forum/topic-30870.html

I had previously thought of mounting these little accelerometer babies on the guitar itself (well, one of them), and modulating sound based on how you move the guitiar. But now that I've got CHF and a good reason to move my feet around, I'd like to sense the foot motion and warpitize the guitar sound in response. Any ideas for what would be good?

I can do an entire synthetic guitar in ChucK and play it in response to foot motion or I can run the guitar thru ChucK and modify it accordingly. I really need to get my footies into the action for health reasons as is mentioned in the other thread. Suggestions from fellow string-heads?

Antimon · Posted: Mon Dec 15, 2008 8:25 am Post subject:

I once had an open tuning (probably E), used my index finger for holding down a chord and whacked a bikepump over the strings. If I were good at steel guitar I guess I wouldn't need the open tuning. Anyway, you can phrase and stuff by letting the bikepump bounce against the strings, or slide against them (rough surface on the pump)... and stuff. Maybe I should have used two pumps...

/Stefan