The Steel Guitar Forum

Playing slide vs steel. I've been playing my round-neck dobro lap-style for a year or so, tuned to open G with a low E. I play a lot of chord based things, with single note runs and such, but a lot of chords (the low E gives me m7 chords with the root on the bottom, and of course all the major chords with the root on the fifth string). So my glass side fell off the table the other day, I picked it and the guitar up and started playing bottle neck. Liked it a lot, recalled that I love Bonnie Raitt, she plays the open G tuning a lot, so I played some slide for a while, and days later still picking at it. But I play totally different things with the slide. Basically no chords, at most two or three strings, don't touch the root note strings, and virtually all single note stuff seems to come out of my fingers. I wondered if this tended to happen to other people who play both ways?

Hello Brian,
James Kerr from Scotland here, is this the type of thing you are thinking about. maybe you could let us hear something.

https://youtu.be/gcVEH_fo6ko

JK.

I play both lap steel and bottleneck. I switch back and forth, based upon what the song needs. The electric bottleneck style I play is somewhere around the style of Duane Allman, Joe Walsh, and Don Felder. Walsh and Felder both learned bottleneck from Duane. I put the slide on my ring finger like Duane did and play mostly one to three strings at a time plucking with my fingers. I favor the Les Paul for that style. When I shift to round-neck reso it is similar to that style as well. When I play lap steel or lap steel style reso it is influenced by David Gilmour.

Bob

I find slide guitar a million times easier than lap steel.

Bottleneck songs are generally simpler than the lap steel stuff I work on.

Bottleneck tunings are simpler than the lap steel tunings I work with.

I don't slant the bottleneck slide, which simplifies things quite a bit.

I believe that the ergonomics of lap steel are so much easier that slide guitar for several reasons:

The shorter scale length makes it easier to control the sound, both playing in tune and adding vibrato.

The fact that your fingers hold the bar means that a wide variety of bar shapes can all be grasped firmly. Slide guitar depends on you finding a slide that more or less is the right diameter, and even then, no one finger is as strong as holding the bar with several fingers.

When playing lap steel, your body is in a natural position and gravity helps to hold the instrument in position while guitarists already have to hunch their shoulders and the strap introduces body asymetry, slide guitar players can't use the left thumb to hold the guitar steady the way non-slide guitarists do.

The hands of the lap steel player are in a natural position, or at least close to one used for other common activities like typing, driving and writing. The slide guitarist's left wrist is contorted to be in the playing position, and pressing down makes this even moreso. Of course, the slide guitarist who presses too hard will hit the frets!

I understand the above is a somewhat subjective opinion, and YMMV, but I would never go back to playing slide guitar. It's easier to play slide guitar licks on the lap steel than the guitar.

The sound of bottleneck or metal ring finger slide guitar is different from steel. It’s not just the technique, which is obviously and dramatically different. I was once asked by a bandleader to play slide guitar instead of steel on a song because the slide on the recorded version “sounded so cool”, which apparently the steel did not.

Fred Treece wrote:The sound of bottleneck or metal ring finger slide guitar is different from steel. It’s not just the technique, which is obviously and dramatically different. I was once asked by a bandleader to play slide guitar instead of steel on a song because the slide on the recorded version “sounded so cool”, which apparently the steel did not.

Fair point, you get a lot of cool noisy artifacts with bottleneck. I played electric slide, and they didn't sound good, I struggled to execute cleanly. But for some good old country blues, bottleneck is a very cool sound.

I played bottleneck exclusively for many years before finding my voice on lap steel. The approach is just different. I used heavy strings with fairly low action (for bottleneck) so I could play chords and anything really with my other three fingers.

The bottleneck was a lot of single note lines and double stops. The lap steel is similar in that respect but more harmonically rich with more sophisticated tunings, slants and three note voicings.

I never had any of the problems Matt talks about. I did make my own slide out of brass pipe so it fit really well on my pinky. It’s easy to wrap your third finger around the slide for more control. If you play with the slide on the third finger, you can control it with the middle and pinky fingers.

As far as ergonomics go, if you hold your guitar in the right position all of those problems go away. I used a strap, standing and sitting. I never hunched my shoulders. My wrist was pretty much flat most of the time. I’ve never held a guitar steady with my thumb, so I don’t know what that’s all about. My thumb just slides along the back of the neck, more or less in the middle.

Once I picked up the lap steel I pretty much stopped playing guitar. It just feels right for me. Or it did. After many years of saying I would never try pedals someone gave me a Fessenden Six-Shooter. Now I try to play a 12 string universal in between bouts of pounding my head against a wall.

Matt Berg wrote:I believe that the ergonomics of lap steel are so much easier that slide guitar for several reasons:

The shorter scale length makes it easier to control the sound, both playing in tune and adding vibrato.

The fact that your fingers hold the bar means that a wide variety of bar shapes can all be grasped firmly. Slide guitar depends on you finding a slide that more or less is the right diameter, and even then, no one finger is as strong as holding the bar with several fingers.

When playing lap steel, your body is in a natural position and gravity helps to hold the instrument in position while guitarists already have to hunch their shoulders and the strap introduces body asymetry, slide guitar players can't use the left thumb to hold the guitar steady the way non-slide guitarists do.

The hands of the lap steel player are in a natural position, or at least close to one used for other common activities like typing, driving and writing. The slide guitarist's left wrist is contorted to be in the playing position, and pressing down makes this even moreso. Of course, the slide guitarist who presses too hard will hit the frets!

I understand the above is a somewhat subjective opinion, and YMMV, but I would never go back to playing slide guitar. It's easier to play slide guitar licks on the lap steel than the guitar.

To me, one of the big differences is the ability to fret as well as to slide when playing slide guitar.