Boost Your Bottleneck Slide Playing by Focusing on Chord Tones
Chord tones provide not only a solid foundation for expanding your slide playing but a template for soloing in general, with or without slide.
Pete Madsen
Pete Madsen is an acoustic blues, ragtime and slide guitarist from the San Francisco Bay Area. He's the author of Play the Blues Like..., an essential guide for playing fingerstyle blues in open tunings.
Acoustic Blues Basics: Using Open Strings to Boost Your Soloing
Here you'll learn a few cool licks that go beyond the minor pentatonic scale—and how to put them to use for your own leads and improvisations.
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Spice Up Your Chord and Lead Work with Double-Stops
From folk to blues to rock and beyond, the harmonies produced by double-stops can make a melody in any genre stand out.
Guitar Lesson: Simple Acoustic-Blues Tips That Can Improve Your Bottleneck-Slide Technique
There are several things you can do to get a good slide sound: Set up your guitar with heavier strings, use an open tuning, try different kinds of slides, dampen the strings, and learn to properly intonate. Getting a good sound is often as much a function of proper setup as it is technique.
Guitar Lesson: Fingerpicking on the Blues in C Major
Here are three ways to play a 12-bar blues in C major on guitar, seen through the lens of the old blues masters.
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Video Lesson: An Intro to Bottleneck Slide Blues Guitar
Learn the basics of acoustic slide guitar and start to find the notes between the notes where the range of human emotion runs.
Review: Fender Paramount PR-180E Is an Affordable Resonator with Old-School Personality
The Fender Paramount PR-180E is an affordable resonator that has a sweet sound and appeal for slide guitarists, fingerpickers, flatpickers, and strummers alike.
Class Action: Tips on Building a Successful Guitar Teaching Practice
Whether you want to recruit a few students or develop a full schedule, here are a few suggestions to get the ball rolling.
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Make Your Own Blues Using Classic Guitar Licks and Phrases
If you look to the masters for inspiration—without copying them note for note—you can produce blues verses and solos that sound fresh and exciting on guitar.
Guitar Lesson: How to Play the Blues Like R.L. Burnside
If you like your blues with funky drive, listening to and learning Burnside’s riffs and licks will get your mojo working. Learn to play in his raw percussive style.
Learn to Play in Open G
A lesson on how to play fingerstyle blues in this popular open tuning, using examples from classic songs by Elizabeth Cotten, Robert Johnson, and more.
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How to Fingerpick the Blues Like Mississippi John Hurt: The Alternating-Bass Pattern
Listening to players like Mississippi John Hurt, Reverend Gary Davis, and John Fahey will get your ear accustomed to fingerpicking blues. In this lesson, you’ll apply the techniques they’re known for to a 12-bar blues, but you can also use them to play ragtime, early jazz, and folk.
Gear Review: Beard A-Model Odyssey
With its mixture of vintage and modern appointments, the Beard A-Model Odyssey resonator guitar has a stunning look that is certain to captivate the audience at any gig.
Video Lesson: Using the CAGED System with the 12-bar Blues
The study of prewar blues includes a heavy amount of time playing in first position—between the nut and the first four frets of your guitar. However, as you learn more and more songs, you might be asking yourself, “What comes next?”
Gear Review: National M-14T Thunderbox
Although known for its steel and brass instruments, National also offers many wood-bodied guitars, both tricone and single-cone biscuit bridge style. The M-14T Thunderbox is the most recent addition to National’s M series of single-cone mahogany resonators.
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Video Lesson: How to Play Bottleneck in a Range of Styles
Slide/bottleneck guitar can evoke flavors ethereal and lyrical or aggressive and bombastic. From Santo & Johnny’s “Sleepwalk” to Elmore James’ “Dust My Broom” and on to Debashish Bhattacharya’s Indian slide musings, this approach delivers a wide spectrum of sounds, emotions, and cultural touchstones.
Gear Review: MagSlide Magnesium Guitar Slide
The most common materials for bottleneck slides are steel, brass, glass, and ceramic. I have also seen slides fashioned from copper tubing and plastic cylinders. Now comes the MagSlide, made of magnesium, the eighth most abundant element, as well as the lightest structural metal on earth.
Gear Review: Iris Guitar Company OG Standard
The Iris’ terrific-feeling neck, with a perfect rounded-C profile that’s .880 at the first fret, split the difference between skinny modern and vintage hefty.
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Gear Review: KLOS Carbon Fiber Acoustic Electric Travel Guitar
There has been a revolution of sorts in guitar making over the past 15 years. RainSong, Blackbird, Composite Acoustics, and now KLOS have developed carbon-fiber instruments that can withstand the elements of extreme heat, cold, and moisture without suffering damage.
Learn to Play Scott Joplin’s Ragtime Classic “The Entertainer” on Guitar
“The Entertainer,” Scott Joplin’s 1902 ragtime piano masterpiece, is known the world over and is a great challenge for the blues fingerpicker.
Gear Review: Alvarez-Yairi Honduran DYM60HD
The partnership between Yairi and Alvarez goes back several decades, with the Alvarez-Yairi stamp reserved for Alvarez’s finest instruments. While much of Alvarez’s line is manufactured in China, the Yairi-branded guitars are made in a small shop in Kani, Japan, where modern power tools are eschewed in favor of hand tools, like spokeshaves for carving necks, and hide-glue construction is standard throughout.
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Preview the New ‘Play the Blues Like…’
Blues, like folk music, is all about making it your own. The ultimate goal is to study the greats and piece together what you have learned in a unique way. The more sources you borrow from, the less you sound…
Gear Review: Recording King Rattlesnake Resonator
Mojo and character abound in this affordable wood-bodied single-cone resonator guitar.
Play the Blues Like… | Acoustic Guitar Champions
Learn the styles of 12 all-time great pre- and postwar guitarists, from Elizabeth Cotten to Charley Patton to Alvin Youngblood Hart.
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Learn to Play ‘An Operatic Rag’ — An Accordion Gem for Guitar
Accordion music of the early 20th century might seem an odd source of inspiration for a fingerstyle guitarist, but not for the San Francisco Bay Area musician Craig Ventresco, with his vast musical knowledge of that bygone era. I have…
