Slide Guitar in Standard Tuning
Blues slide without the open tunings
Most slide teaching starts with retuning: open E or open G, a second guitar, and a neck you no longer recognise. For most players, that’s where slide stops. This book keeps your guitar in standard tuning and shows you where every note you need sits in relation to the slide.
The blue notes are already under the bar
Put a slide straight across the strings in standard tuning and read what’s under it, counting from the 1st string. You get root, 5, ♭3, ♭7, 4, root. The two notes the blues leans on most are already there, and they’re there at every fret.
Open D and open E work the other way round. They give you a major chord under the slide, and you go looking for the blue notes. Standard tuning gives you the blue notes, and the major third is one fret away. For the blues, I think that’s the better starting point, and it’s the idea this book is built on.
From Chapter 3: the slide at the 5th fret. Same intervals at every fret.
A map, not a lick book
Most slide books give you licks to copy. This one gives you every note you need as a fixed distance from the slide: the ♭7 two frets behind on the 1st string, the major third one fret up on the 3rd, and so on. Learn the distances once and they work in every key, over every chord.
Because you stay in standard tuning, your fretted vocabulary still works. You can play two bars of ordinary blues licks and answer them with the slide, or mix fretted and slid notes inside a single phrase. That’s the one thing open tunings do badly, and a whole chapter covers it.
There are 20 phrases, four turnarounds and three complete choruses, but every note is labelled by interval, so you can move any of them anywhere and eventually write your own.
What’s inside
Why standard tuning
The case against retuning, and the one thing open tunings genuinely do better.
Technique, the short version
Slide, finger, setup, pressure, muting and vibrato. Only what matters.
The bar map
Root, 5, ♭3, ♭7, 4, root under the slide, at every fret. The chapter everything else depends on.
Two triads under one bar
Minor with the root on top, major with the root on the 3rd string. Minor to major on the same chord.
The top pair
Single-note lines and double stops on the 1st and 2nd strings.
The major third and dominant sounds
Where the 3 is, and how to get a dominant sound without a chord you can’t play.
Fretted notes and slide together
The fretted zone behind the slide, lift-offs, hammer-ons and open-position answers.
12-bar maps
Slide positions and open-string bass notes for blues in E, A and G, and any other key.
Phrases and turnarounds
20 phrases grouped by what they do in a blues, plus four turnarounds.
Three choruses
Slow minor blues in A, a shuffle in E, and G with open strings.
Who it’s for
You already play blues in standard tuning and know the minor pentatonic. You’ve tried slide once or twice and put it down again, probably because of the retuning. You don’t need to read music, and you don’t need much theory beyond knowing what an interval is.
If what you want is big six-string open chords in the Delta tradition, retune. That’s what open tunings are for, and this book says so. For single notes and pairs of notes on the top strings, which is most slide playing, standard tuning does the job, and you keep the neck you already know.
No retuning. No second guitar. No new neck to learn.
No Shapes
The distance-from-a-reference idea applied to improvising and building chords. No boxes, no scale patterns.
See the book →How to Practice the Blues and more
How to Practice the Blues, the Simple Blues Soloing System and both Blues Soloing Maps books, with the Blues Chord Book free.
See the bundle →