the acoustic instrument: every electric instrument is also an acoustic instrument, though solid body guitars don’t resonate very well by themselves; the acoustic instrument causes me to focus on the technique of playing, this being where I work on my scale and chord knowledge as well as my fingerstyle repertoire (the Gibson). Work on these tunes in particular:

  1. “Li’l Darlin’”
  2. “Body and Soul”
  3. “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face”
  4. “Speak Low”
  5. “My Funny Valentine”
  6. “Stardust”
  7. “Alone Together”
  8. “It’s Only a Paper Moon”
  9. “The More I See You”
  10. “My Foolish Heart”
  11. “Caravan”
  12. “For All We Know”
  13. “Darn That Dream”

I knew all of these tunes as fingerstyle arrangements at one point, so it shouldn’t take long to remember how to play them. Keep a working repertoire of fingerstyle tunes, and add to them gradually. The same goes for the bottleneck repertoire, though I am writing about that under electric instrument, hoping to make the transition to electric slide playing.

the electric instrument: resonator guitars have a transitional amplification technology, pre-electric instrument but also post-acoustic; the Fender Stratocaster is a space-age instrument if ever there was one, very different from an acoustic instrument; imagine if Jimi Hendrix did some gigs with Sun Ra, the sound would be bursts of energy and funk mixed into the celestial chords and rhythms; setup the Strat for bottleneck playing, consider having the trem bridge altered or blocked so I can stabilize the tuning and action (I tuned the Strat to open-E, but the tuning is very unstable. I definitely need to block the trem bridge.); ultimately I need a dedicated guitar with a fixed bridge for bottleneck playing; try bottleneck on the Gibson; go through my bottleneck repertoire:

  1. Fred McDowell: play along
  2. Elmore James: play along
  3. Son House: play along with his older stuff - that’s the juice
  4. Muddy Waters: play along with the Lomax recordings
  5. William Brown: I can’t remember the title of the tune, but it plays well as a bottleneck tune in open-G
  6. R.L. Burnside: “Poor Black Mattie” plays great as a bottleneck tune
  7. Lightning Hopkins: not really a slide player, but the melodies can be played with a bottleneck
  8. Hound Dog Taylor: I don’t know his repertoire, but the few things I have heard are nasty good
  9. Robert Nighthawk: I don’t know the repertoire. doesn’t he play lap steel?
  10. Robert Johnson: Johnson’s style of bottleneck playing is very similar to Son House

Work out the major, mixolydian, dorian, and blues scales in open-G and open-E tunings, then begin to transcribe those scales to different keys; work out II/V phrases with the bottleneck; work out chord fragments and voicings in the open tunings; work out backing riffs and heads for tunes; figure out how Son House grooves can be played with an ensemble; work on single-note tone, articulation, and vibrato along with the various shadings of blue notes (bottleneck guitar playing is often microtonal); work on less busy bottleneck rhythms