Slide Guitar Tips
Ry Cooder ruined me, and I mean that in the best possible way.
I heard that vibrato of his and it hit me right in the feels. So I got Into the Purple Valley, then Bop Till You Drop, which is still a favorite to this day, and I sat there a good long while trying to work out what he was doing.
The problem with learning from Ry Cooder was that I was watching the wrong hand. I was watching the slide, the way everybody does. Thinking maybe it was a different slide, glass instead of steel, maybe on a different finger.
Meanwhile the thing that made Ry sound like Ry was going on over on the other hand. Fingers on the strings and some greasy chicken pickin’. Slide isn’t a lick problem. It’s a right hand problem, a muting problem, a vibrato problem, a landing-in-tune problem. Four or five physical things, all of them happening somewhere other than where you’ve been looking.
Nobody walked me through all of these and it took me a lot longer than it needed to.
