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It’s only a matter of time before every guitar player’s curiosity bubbles over into the world of slide guitar. Whether it’s the old-time blues masters like Muddy Waters or psychedelic rockers like Jimi Hendrix who pull you in, slide-guitar doesn’t have to be your primary playing style for you to dabble in (or master) the skill. To help you get started, we’ve rounded up the best guitar slides on the market to help you achieve that sought-after sound.
How Do Guitar Slides Work?
A guitar slide is a metal, glass, steel, or ceramic cylinder that is worn on a guitarist’s finger to slide up and down the guitar’s fretboard. They create a very distinctive, “slippery” sound that is often associated with blues music. The best guitar slides help you create a more emotive and resonant sound too, something you can’t achieve by plucking or strumming alone.
How Do I Choose a Guitar Slide?
Size and comfort are obviously important when it comes to choosing the best guitar slide for you – if you’re going to master the technique, you want a slide that actually feels good to use. However, the most brands sell slides in a variety of sizes, so the main thing you need to consider while shopping is the slide’s material. Metal, glass, steel and ceramic slides all achieve that slide guitar sound.
However, like all things in music, the slide guitar effect is more nuanced than a one-sound-fits-all model, and within that one overarching classification there are variations in tone and style. Metal guitar slides produce a metallic, bright tone while glass guitar slides give more subtle, mellow sounds. Ceramic slides bridge that difference and produce bluesy sounds somewhere in the middle of the two extremes.
Almost as important as a slide’s material is the slide’s thickness. The thicker the slide’s walls are, the more sustain it creates. More sustain lets you play longer, gliding notes. However, more sustain isn’t always better. If you want to play fast, a lighter slide lets you move around the fretboard with greater ease and speed. In that case, having more sustain isn’t as important to the overall sound.
No matter which guitar slide you choose, you’re sure to experience the joys of experimenting as you play. Here are some of the best guitar slides to pick up online.
