Slide Guitar Is A Mind-Set
Guitar players like Duane Allman went past the edge on purpose. He’d slide up to a note greasy and funky and grunty, and sometimes he’d land clean beyond the brink of being in and out of tune.
Most people would file that under mistake. But ladies and gentlemen, that was the sound. Here’s the part that really gets me. The Allman Brothers were out doing 300 and some odd dates a year on more or less the same set list, and he played it differently every single night.
Pull up a dozen live versions of Statesboro Blues on today’s internet and you’ll hear a dozen different guys in there. It’s greasy and succulent. Duane could go past the edge because everything underneath him was handled.
The vibrato, which is what gives you your identifiable sound in the first place. The muting, so the strings you aren’t playing kindly were silenced. The intonation, so that past the edge reads as a choice instead of an accident. Take that away and reckless is just noise, and you sound like you’re dragging a cat across the strings.
