The easiest way to play slide guitar is to first adjust your guitar to an open tuning – in this particular lesson we’re going to use Open D Major tuning for our example. That’s the same place I started in my course Essentials of Slide Guitar – today’s short lesson is only scratching the surface of what I covered in there!
The reason I’ve chosen to use an open tuning is because a slide isn’t like your fingers; you can’t bend it into a new shape for every chord you change to. As a result, it is easier to adapt the tuning of our strings so that they work well in a straight line. In other words, we’re going to tune the guitar so that when we strum all six strings without any fingers on the frets, it will create a great sounding D major chord.
Then, we can simply add the slide at any point on the fretboard and create another major chord.
D Major tuning is simply D A D F# A D.
Alright, ready for this? Let’s dive in.
Open D Major Tuning
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRBaaR6iXHE
Watch on Youtube