guitar slide image
Oc�pado
I'm not comfortable with the possibility of cutting my fingers or feet by making a bottleneck guitar slide, so is there any other way?
Answer
Does it have to be glass? If so, I wouldn't worry about it breaking. Glass slides are usually made from pretty thick glass. Just dropping it usually won't break 'em.
Back when I was growing up, there was an allergy medicine called Coricidan that came is these great glass bottles with straight sides on it. The pill bottles are long gone, but you can still buy glass slides made like the originals.
A "real" home made glass slide, if it's going to be used for the blues, should be made from the neck of a bottle of cheap wine. Craft stores sell tools to score the glass and break the neck away from the bottle. Then you would polish the edges with an abrasive cloth to smooth them out. You'll want to find a wine bottle that has a neck with straight sides on it. Night Train, Thunderbird, or Wild Irish Rose meet all the requirements (cheap, straight neck, high alcohol content).
Just keep this in mind...if you don't have a glass cutter and abrasive cloth you'll spend more on those than if you just went and bought a slide. Oh yeah, there's the cost of the wine too (but that's only going to be a few bucks, and you could drink it if you wanted to).
If you want a metal slide (favored by Bonnie Raitt and Johnny Winter), then electrical conduit will do the trick. You can buy it in all kinds of diameters (you'll probably want 1/2" or 3/4", depending on how big your fingers are. Cut to length, polish the ends smooth (the metal will be very sharp after you cut it), and away you go. As slides made from conduit age, they get smoother and turn black. The players that use them tell me that's when they get really good.
Good luck to you.
Greetings from Austin, TX
Ken
Does it have to be glass? If so, I wouldn't worry about it breaking. Glass slides are usually made from pretty thick glass. Just dropping it usually won't break 'em.
Back when I was growing up, there was an allergy medicine called Coricidan that came is these great glass bottles with straight sides on it. The pill bottles are long gone, but you can still buy glass slides made like the originals.
A "real" home made glass slide, if it's going to be used for the blues, should be made from the neck of a bottle of cheap wine. Craft stores sell tools to score the glass and break the neck away from the bottle. Then you would polish the edges with an abrasive cloth to smooth them out. You'll want to find a wine bottle that has a neck with straight sides on it. Night Train, Thunderbird, or Wild Irish Rose meet all the requirements (cheap, straight neck, high alcohol content).
Just keep this in mind...if you don't have a glass cutter and abrasive cloth you'll spend more on those than if you just went and bought a slide. Oh yeah, there's the cost of the wine too (but that's only going to be a few bucks, and you could drink it if you wanted to).
If you want a metal slide (favored by Bonnie Raitt and Johnny Winter), then electrical conduit will do the trick. You can buy it in all kinds of diameters (you'll probably want 1/2" or 3/4", depending on how big your fingers are. Cut to length, polish the ends smooth (the metal will be very sharp after you cut it), and away you go. As slides made from conduit age, they get smoother and turn black. The players that use them tell me that's when they get really good.
Good luck to you.
Greetings from Austin, TX
Ken
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