How to Play Slide Guitar in Standard Tuning

The standard advice for slide guitar is to retune. Open E, open G or open D: put the slide across the strings and you have a major chord. It works, and it’s how a lot of great slide was played. It’s also the reason a lot of players never get going with slide at all. You need a second guitar or constant retuning, and everything you know about the neck stops working.

You can play slide in standard tuning, and most lessons on it tell you how to fake an open tuning sound without retuning. I think that misses the point. Standard tuning has its own layout under the slide, and for the blues it’s a very good one. This lesson shows you what that layout is and how to use it.

What’s under the slide in standard tuning

Put the slide straight across all six strings at the 5th fret, directly over the fret wire. Take the 1st string as your root: that’s A. Now read down the strings: E on the 2nd, C on the 3rd, G on the 4th, D on the 5th and A on the 6th.

As intervals from A, that’s root, 5, ♭3, ♭7, 4, root.

Move the slide to the 7th fret and the notes change, but the intervals don’t: root, 5, ♭3, ♭7, 4, root, now counting from B. Move to the 12th fret and it’s the same again, counting from E. There are no new shapes to learn as you move up the neck. There’s one map, and the only thing that changes is the name of the root.

Why standard tuning works for the blues

The blues leans on two notes more than any others: the ♭3 and the ♭7. In standard tuning, both are under the slide the moment you put it down, on the 3rd and 4th strings.

Open D and open E do the opposite. They give you a major chord under the slide, and you go looking for the ♭3 and ♭7. Standard tuning gives you the blue notes and makes you look for the major third instead, which is one fret up on the 3rd string. For playing blues, that’s a better starting point.

It also means you don’t strum the full bar much. All six strings together are mostly a stack of fourths and don’t sound like a chord you’d name. Most of the time you’ll play one string, two, or three at most, chosen for what they give you.

Every note is a distance from the slide

Once you know what each string gives you under the slide, every other note you need is a fixed distance away. Plus numbers are toward the body, minus numbers are behind the slide toward the nut.

Don’t try to memorise the table. Four moves do most of the work, and the rest fills in as you play.

The first is the sound of blues slide in one gesture: the minor third pushed up into the major. The second and fourth are the same move an octave apart. The third takes you from the safest note to a blue note. None of them needs you to hunt: you put the slide down, and the target is a known distance away.

Two chords under one slide

Pick the right three strings and the bar becomes a chord. Strings 3, 2 and 1 give you a minor triad with the root on top. Strings 4, 3 and 2 give you a major triad with the root on the 3rd string.

That gives you two simple rules. For a minor chord, put the root on the 1st string. For a major chord, put the root on the 3rd string. Over an E7, that means E minor at the 12th fret and E major at the 9th, three frets apart.

Moving from the 12th fret to the 9th is the chord-sized version of sliding the ♭3 up to the 3. It’s blue to bright, on the same chord, with a straight slide.

A 12-bar blues in standard tuning

In a blues in E, the three chords are E, A and B. With the root on the 1st string, that puts the slide at the 12th fret for E, the 5th for A and the 7th for B.

Because the map is the same at every fret, a phrase you play over E at the 12th fret works over A at the 5th and B at the 7th without changing a single distance. Move the slide, keep the phrase.

Diagonal lines are slides. Play it slowly, and aim for the arrival notes to be in tune with the chord, not just close.

Technique that matters more in standard tuning

Put the slide over the fret wire. Not behind it, as you would with a finger. This is the biggest single cause of out-of-tune slide.

Rest, don’t press. The slide sits on the strings. Press it down to the frets and you’ll hear them, and the note goes sharp.

Mute with both hands. In open tuning, a stray string is at least part of the chord. In standard tuning it usually isn’t. Rest a finger or two lightly on the strings behind the slide, and use the picking hand to damp the strings you’re not playing.

Try fingerpicking. With a pick you strike a string and then have to mute its neighbours. With fingers, the ones that aren’t picking are already resting on the other strings. Thumb and two fingers is enough.

What open tunings still do better

Big six-string major chords. Nothing in standard tuning sounds quite like a full open E chord with a slide dragged across it, and if that’s the sound you want, retune. But most slide playing is single notes and pairs of notes on the top strings, and standard tuning does that as well as any open tuning. It also lets you fret a note whenever the slide can’t reach it cleanly, and mix fretted and slid notes in the same phrase, which open tunings do badly.

Questions

Can you play slide guitar in standard tuning?

Yes. Many slide players do much of their playing in standard tuning. It asks more of your muting, and you don’t get a full major chord under a straight slide, but you keep the neck you already know and can switch between slide and fretted playing in the same song.

Which finger should the slide go on?

The ring finger or the little finger. The little finger leaves three fingers free behind the slide for muting and for fretting notes, which matters more in standard tuning than in open tuning.

What’s the easiest key for slide in standard tuning?

A. With the slide at the 5th, 10th and 12th frets for A, D and E, the roots of all three chords are also available as open strings, on the 5th, 4th and 6th strings. You can play a bass note with your thumb and the slide over it.