Pizzazz My Sunshine Part 3

This is the last part of the series on slurs. So far we’ve talked about hammer-ons, and pull-offs, and now we’ll be exploring slides.

One of the things that I haven’t mentioned about the slurs is their lyrical quality. The voice has a very smooth transition from note to note, unless the vocalist chooses otherwise, but plucked instruments, when being plucked, don’t naturally have that quality. We can give plucked instruments that vocal quality by using these different types of slurs.

The way we perform a slide is by fretting a note, striking it with the pick, and then while keeping pressure on the fingerboard sliding your finger to the next note. The cool thing about slides is that they can go up or down, and they’re not limited to how far your fingers can stretch. You can slide from the first fret to the twelfth if you like. Here are some examples:

If you wanted to make these into exercises you could run them across all six strings. There are so many variations that we could do, but I’m keeping the examples to one fret slides. Depending on the melody we could slide anywhere from one fret, to four or five frets. Here’s a basic exercise for developing your slide technique:

In this exercise I’ve shown how to do it using just the first finger sliding from the 1st to the 2nd fret, and back down. To continue like the previous exercises just start with the second finger, and follow the same process, and then move on to the the third finger then the fourth.

Now let’s take a look at how we might use this in You Are My Sunshine:

There it is the last of the slurs. As always, try these out on all of your arrangements. It will give you a lot of variation to draw from, and hopefully spark some new ideas that you might not have thought of before.

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Happy Picking!