lessons | slide: working in the thumb

Learn to play slide melodies with bass notes.

David Hamburger is a guitarist, teacher, and writer who lives in Austin, Texas. He has toured with Salamander Crossing and Five Chinese Brothers and has appeared on recent recordings by Chuck Brodsky and the Kennedys. A regular instructor at the National Guitar Summer Workshop, Hamburger has written a number of instruction books, including The Acoustic Guitar Method for beginners.

In this lesson Hamburger explains how to play bass notes with your thumb underneath slide melodies in open D tuning. You'll learn how to dampen the bass strings through right-hand damping, play eighth-note melodies over a steady bass, and play melodies on the offbeats.

To hear the examples, you need the RealPlayer plug-in. Enjoy your lesson, and check out the instructional book/CD, Slide Basics.

Find out more about Slide Basics.

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Working in the Thumb

One of the main reasons to play slide with your fingers is so you can provide backup for yourself: once you’ve got some funky melodies going with the slide, you can get the bass going with your thumb at the same time. After you work through this lesson, you’ll be able to thump out a steady quarter-note groove on the low string while continuing to syncopate cool licks on top. The first step is finding the bass notes with the thumb; next comes using the thumb to keep a steady bass groove going. Once you can do that, it’s a matter of learning to play licks with the slide without losing track of the bass part your thumb is playing. If you take it in steps, it can be done, and more important, being able to do it will make you tres popular at parties.

Let's start with the opening lick in Example 1 below. We'll play it as a call and response. How does that work? In Example 1, your fingers play the melody with the slide (that’s the call), and then you answer with two bass notes, played by your thumb (that’s the response).

Tuning

Example 1

To better hear where those bass notes are falling in each measure, repeat the lick a number of times, as in Example 2, until you can keep it going with a good sense of groove.

Example 2

Raising the stakes just a little more now, try dropping in the bass-note responses while playing a sequence of two different melody phrases, as in Example 3.

Example 3

You could even play an entire eight-bar blues using this call-and-response approach. It’s laid out for your reading and playing pleasure in Example 4.

Example 4


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© 2001 String Letter Publishing, Inc., David A. Lusterman, Publisher.