singemonkey wrote
This is something that I had no idea about. Ta Bob. Obviously fretting behind the slide shortens the string and changes the pitch of the note sounding under the slide. Very cool to know. You still going on with slide lessons? I'm just beginning to get the hang of it.
No. The guy I was taking lessons with has packed teaching in. He showed me that trick, but it is action sensitive. Said teacher is actually a lap steel player so he has no chance of using that trick.
I think you do need a bit higher an action to play slide, but not massively higher, and beefier plain strings help the tone.
When I saw Martin Simpson last year he was kind enough to show me and talk about his gear after the show. He'd been playing some slide (he's a very good slide player, also more than handy with a weissenborn). He had two guitars with him, I'd seen him play conventionally (IE chords, fretted notes, hammers and pulls) on both, but he only used one of them for slide. That guitar had a slightly higher action and a 15 ? for the first string. Yet he was playing that like a regular guitar. I was amazed.
