Korgscrew
Group: Super Admins
Posts: 3511
Joined: Dec. 1999 |
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Posted: Dec. 16 2004, 04:36 |
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| Quote (ktran @ Dec. 15 2004, 02:40) | | A slide will not help you play notes higher than your guitar is capable of. |
Well...it kind of will and won't. Yes, you can play as high as you want, but the shaping/placement of the cutaways on the body will limit where you can go somewhat. Trying to play beyond the end of the neck with the slide still on your finger and keep it sounding musical isn't something terribly easy. I would tend to take the slide off and hold it more like a lapsteel player would, once I get to the end of the neck (though I think you'd still be able to play a '24th fret' note using a slide on a strat without switching over like that). It's tricky to switch over smoothly (and get it back on again on the way down), but it's the only way I've personally been able to make it work...with quite good results - the last time I used the technique at a gig with a group, they thought it was the wildest thing they'd ever seen.
The trouble with using a slide for playing high notes in solos like those in Ommadawn is again one of switching over - you'd have to switch from fretting notes to playing them with a slide. With a conventional slide, that means keeping it on one finger throughout the whole solo, making that finger useless for fretting notes (because it's stuck inside a rigid tube! ). It takes quite a bit of practise to be able to fret notes with the other fingers without the slide interfering with what you're doing, and I have a feeling it would just be too limiting as far as playing the solos from Ommadawn goes.
I've seen various solutions to this in the past which involve partial slides which strap on to one joint of the finger (and being strapped on with something flexible, they then make conventional playing easier while wearing it). I'm not sure I'd recommend such things if you've never tried playing slide guitar before, though.
My personal recommendation would be a glass slide - I feel they sound better than the metal ones (or at least, thin metal ones, perhaps a heavy, smooth metal one would sound better, but they all tend to be thinner and with brushed surfaces, which I feel sounds a bit scratchy).
You can play slide using normal gauge strings and a relatively normal action, but it takes a really careful touch, and doesn't sound as good as with heavier strings (lighter strings tend not to sound as good as heavier ones generally, in fact, though that can depend...). For a while, my number 1 guitar was one strung with 11 gauge strings...it's amazing what you can get used to! It sounded good, but I play it less now.
The highest note on Ommadawn is in the solo at the end of Part One (if I remember right) - he hits a high F sharp there. You really need 22 frets for that, and light gauge strings. Remember also that Mike was playing a Gibson there, which had a stop-bar rather than a tremolo bridge. The thing with tremolo units like on the strat is that when you bend a note, you're stretching the tremolo springs too, as the string pulls the bridge up away from the body. You might not notice that happening, but it does, and it makes the notes harder to bend as a result. The scale length of the strat is also longer, making the tension of the strings slightly higher.
The classic strat (i.e. to Leo Fender's original design) is with 21 frets, the more modern versions (like the American Standard for example) have 22.
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