How To Read And Play Slides
Author: Krauser // Category: how to play guitar tabs, how to play tabs
Today we are going to talk about slides. How to play guitar tabs with slides? In short, a slide is when you hold a certain fret, say fret 4 on 6th string, and when you want to play the next fret, instead of releasing the 4th fret, you slide your hand towards the needed fret up or down. Note that you don’t hit the string in slide. You only hit the first note, and then you only adjust your left hand position on the fretboard.
In guitar tabs to indicate a slide most often used the backslash ‘\’ and slash ‘/’. Backslash means slide down, e.g. from fret 9 to fret 7, and slash also known as forward slash means up slide from 9 to 10 for example. Sometimes ’s’ is used to indicate slides. Generally you don’t need to indicate upslide or downslide specifically, since mostly it is obvious:
E---------------------------------------------------------------- B------6/8------------------------------------------------------- G---------------------------------------------------------------- D---------------------------------------------------------------- A---------------------------------------------------------------- E----------------------------------------------------------------
However in some cases the upslide and downslide indications are necessary to figure out how to play the particular part. Consider this example:
E---------------------------------------------------------------- B------/6-8-6\--------------------------------------------------- G---------------------------------------------------------------- D---------------------------------------------------------------- A---------------------------------------------------------------- E----------------------------------------------------------------
Here you clearly see that you need to slide from a lower pitch to fret 6 at the beginning, and at the end you slide from fret 6 back to the lower pitch. You determine where to start and end the slide in this example. The desired effect is usually the swooping in from a lower pitch or fading towards a lower pitch.
You could have a whole series of slides chained like in this example:
E---------------------------------------------------------------- B------8/10/12\10\8\7\8------------------------------------------ G---------------------------------------------------------------- D---------------------------------------------------------------- A---------------------------------------------------------------- E----------------------------------------------------------------
Which actually means you strike only the first note, and all consequent notes of the slide are played using the initial energy from the strike by adjusting your hand accordingly.
Learning how to play guitar tabs is very easy, but almost every more advanced topic requires some guitar technique knowledge. For example, you can’t really understand how to play tabs with natural or artificial harmonics without knowing what harmonics are, how to play them and what are the difference between the natural harmonics and the artificial ones.
