Sliding into Notes

[mandrian]

Hi,

I'm trying to learn more by ear these days. The specific tune I'm learning at present is Crying as played by Julian Lage.

My question is whether there is a general rule of thumb when sliding up to one note from another. Do you slide up from the previous note in the scale, from the previous fret, or from just whatever sounds best to your ear?

Thanks for any guidance provided.

Regards

[Mark Gunter]

What sounds best to your ear is the trick, in addition to context (where are you just prior to sliding).

[CarlM]

There are a lot of ways to approach sliding. One trick a teacher showed me is to lay the fingernail on the string rather than the pad. It helps clarity. The Clarence White book by Roland discusses sliding really extensively as you work through the songs. I was never aware before that there were so many ways to slide, from the fret below or two frets or from an indefinite point halfway up or to hammer on and slide or to switch fingers in the middle or to slide off a note and other nuances each giving a different articulation.

[rcc56]

You can even slide down from a note, though this is not done much on mandolins. But there's no reason it couldn't be done more often.

[Mark Gunter]

There are too many examples to cite to hear and watch sliding technique; there are too many variations on how to slide whether up or down, or what note to slide from, etc. But in music, there is one hard and fast rule, and probably the only real one, and that is to play what sounds good.

In the past week in an old thread people have been discussing Nancy Blake's playing on her tune, Hangin' Dog. IMHO, there is no finer example of beautiful use of slides. She slides up, she slides down.

She slides from G (fifth fret D string) to B (9th fret D string) to lead into the second full measure of the tune; she slides from G (fifth fret D string) to A (7th fret D string) to lead into the sixth measure; watch the video to see her effortless slides up and down all over this tune. Her tone is awesome and her ornaments (slides, hammer-ons, pull-offs) are plentiful and tasteful. Nancy called her ornaments "flummy-diddles"



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_I_hmwUMHzE

[CarlM]

If you want a demonstration of one thousand different ways to slide then listen to the Indian mandolinist, Mandolin Rajesh, playing on Mandolin Mondays this week. It is on electric mandolin so there is more sustain but it is still pretty amazing.

[mandocrucian]

Here are a couple solo tracks that have various sliding techniques, plus electric guitar vibrato, string bending, and other stuff >>>

https://soundcloud.com/user-64352297...ts/mando-stuff

https://soundcloud.com/user-64352297...-solo-mandolin

Slide up the neck, down the neck, back and forth... changing positions via slide. Once you can get beyond "positions", there is just the "whole neck" to skate around on.

Niles H

[loess]

Mike Seeger could pull off some of the "slitheriest" slides around, especially when it comes to double stops. Check out the clip beginning at 30:33 in the documentary "Homemade American Music" (there doesn't appear to be a way to link directly to a timestamp, so you'll need to fast forward to 30m33sec manually)

http://www.folkstreams.net/film-detail.php?id=153

The entire film is wonderful, as is the Folkstreams website that it resides on - a treasure trove of American folk films.