Using Finger Slides to
Liven Up Your Lead Guitar

Firstly, I just want to make it clear that this lesson is not about slide guitar using a bottleneck (commonly used in country music). It's about using slides as a regular finger technique in your lead guitar, in the same way you might use bends, hammer ons and vibratos.

How many people have left this page now, I wonder? :o)

Anyway, for those of you who have stayed, this lesson will show you how to use slides effectively, to add another texture to your lead guitar soloing.

By adding this technique to your "attack", along with hammer-ons, pull-offs, bends, and other techniques, you'll have several creative options when it comes to writing and improvising your own lead guitar licks!

Let's make a start...

The basics of finger sliding on guitar

It's really quite simple. Let's start with a practical example.

Below is a basic, two-note phrase, with the suggested fingering in blue.

Now, to add a bit of texture to that first note, we can slide up to it.

Take a listen first to hear what I mean:

>> Click to hear

The most practical way to do this is to identify the finger you'll be using for that note, fret the string somewhere below the destination fret (the end of your slide) and slide up using that same finger. Where do you slide from? Well, the longer you want the slide to last, the longer the sliding distance!

Ideally, it's good to get into the habit of starting your slides on a note/fret in the scale or key you're playing in. If you're unsure of how to do this, hang on, because we'll be looking at this in a minute! It's just about knowing your scale patterns.

Now, when you see a slide in a guitar tab, for the audio example we heard, it would look something like this:

That slash symbol can be up / or down depending on the direction of the slide! It may include brackets around the starting fret for your slide - some people tab like that, some don't.

So those are the basics. Pretty simple eh? Now let's move on and get more inventive with slides...

Slides help you use more of the guitar's fretboard!

Slides can be used on guitar for two main purposes:

1. To add texture to your lead guitar solo and to make the fingering smoother. For example, you can slide up using a particular finger and then be in the best position ready for the next part of the solo.
2. To allow you to use more of the fretboard, rather than just being boxed in. You can slide between scale patterns and effectively "link them up".

The below example touches on these. You'll notice that overall the solo spans quite a wide section of the fretboard, and the slides help to flow it all together nicely.

Take a look and listen below. I've included down slides as well in this example - exactly the same technique from above, just reversed!

Click diagram to hear

The blue numbers are a suggested fingering.

So all you're doing is picking a starting point, and sliding up or down to the desired fret/note in your solo.

In the example above, you can see how occasionally sliding up and down over one string frees up our hands over more fretboard space. What you'll find is you can use slides to move between the boxed scale shapes and make one large scale. This "out-of-the-box" technique is covered in separate lesson, because it doesn't just apply to slides!

Once you know how scales link together in sequence, to create larger patterns across the fretboard, you'll learn which fingers to slide with in order to position yourself best for the proceeding frets/notes.

If you want, you can use the backing track below to try the exercise above, or your own solo (tip: try Lydian)...

>> Click to hear

Mixing finger slides with other lead guitar techniques

In this final exercise, we're going to look at a slide technique that works especially well with hammer-ons and pull-offs (click those links for their seperate lessons if you need to learn the techniques).

In lead guitar, scales are usually played across more than one string, but by using slides we can make use of just one string, up and down the fretboard.

Let's first take a look at how we can apply hammer-ons and pull-offs to complement this kind of movement.

Take a look at the animation below and click the diagram to hear an example.

So, slide dowwwwn the fretboard using your index finger and hammer-on/pull-off using your other fingers to create a kind of staggered, see-saw pattern - experiment and see what kind of sequence you can come up with.

Using this single string technique also allows you, like we saw before, to link up boxed scale patterns across more fretboard space.

Listen to the example below by clicking the tab diagram to see how I've incorporated this technique into a mini-solo...

Try it yourself over the backing track below (or try and come up with your own sequence of course!)...

>> Click to hear

Still more to learn...

This lesson just introduced the basics to using slides. The key thing is to use this technique with other lead guitar techniques, such as bends, vibratos, hammer-ons etc. so you build on layers of texture into your soloing. However, don't overuse them, and don't crowd your solo with them. Use them when you feel it adds the desired expression to your music, or just when it physically makes sense. Just my opinion though :)

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