So lately I've been learning some slide. Like many guitarists, I've owned a slide for years without actually learning how to use it, instead pulling it out every so often to mess around with and make some horrible noises. Now that I need to cover a few songs involving slide parts, I figured it was time to really get down to work.
As a reference, I have lots of slide players that I love to listen to, so I know when something sounds like a good piece of slide-work, and when it sounds like I'm skinning a cat. My top two fav sliders are Duane Allman and Sonny Landreth.
Both these chaps were/are monsters of slide and both did a lot in terms of developing innovative slide techniques. Duane was instrumental in bringing slide into Rock and his work as a session player may have been more important that his Allman Bros. work. Landreth changed the way slide is played entirely, developing a technique involving fretting chords behind and ahead of the slide to allow for a more riff-oriented blues sound that retains the singing quality of a slide. Granted, I'm nowhere near as talented and either of these dudes, not by a long-shot, but listening to them really helps get your head around how a slide should be used.
I've settled on using a skinny steel slide on my pinky finger, letting my use the rest of my hand to either play chords or lead lines when I'm not sliding, but also it gives me a much larger area of my hand to use to mute the strings behind the slide. So far it's working out pretty good, but I got a lot of work to do on my technique before I can start to really explore the slide's potential. Not that I necessarily want to become a slide player - as much as I like the way it sounds, it prefer using it as a texture sound to accent some songs, not as my go-to sound.
