Episode 9 - Martin Harley 'Slide, Booze, Blues and Swimming'

In this episode Chris chats with Martin Harley https://www.martinharley.com/. This podcast is brought to you by Ibanez UK.

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:11

In this episode, I chat with Martin Harley. Martin is an inspirational slide guitarist. So you'll join the conversation just as we've come out of about 30 minutes of an absolute technical nightmare. So there's a sense of relief in the air, and I think it sets the tone perfectly for where the conversation seems to very quickly lead, which is around drinking and playing, the life of a musician and alcohol, which I think is a really fascinating subject. About halfway through the conversation, we move away from the big philosophical stuff and the life-changing choices that we can make, and we dive into the magic of slide playing, and Martin will treat you to some really beautiful slide playing. He's demoing stuff to give us inspiration and show us different routes into slide playing, which is really beneficial from like a tuition perspective. But actually, to be quite honest, just sitting and listening to him play those examples is absolutely fantastic. So, however you're enjoying this podcast, whether you're driving the car or whether you're sat with your guitar and bottleneck in hand, ready to pick up some tips and tricks, I know you're gonna enjoy this. Oh yeah, and by the way, about halfway through the podcast, I'm really struggling to find a word, and it kind of bothered me for the whole episode. But the word was homology, uh, the definition of which is a structural, functional, or symbolic correspondence between different elements of social or cultural whole. It describes a resonance or direct mapping between objective and social positions. Interesting, huh? So there you go. You can enjoy the podcast even more now. Man, I do feel traumatized.

SPEAKER_02 2:07

Yeah, marginally. It never works like um during lockdown, you know, we were all trying to stay afloat as musicians, so I would get uh a few invitations to do stuff online, and uh it would always go entirely wrong. And it would just be somehow the camera would be the wrong way around, and my children would be dancing in the background, and yeah, just not nothing, none of them ever worked, not a single one went off um in a meaningful way. I mean they were hilarious, but none of them none of them really worked.

SPEAKER_00 2:51

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 2:53

So I just did a lot of um hanging out with my children for sort of three years.

SPEAKER_03 3:00

Well, that's pretty positive, isn't it? But it's nice it's nice to mix things up, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 3:05

Yeah, no, it was wonderful actually. I think previous to the pandemic, which was obviously really traumatic for a lot of people, I was probably touring too much anyway, and was sort of super tired and super frazzled and kind of you know, uh drinking a lot at gigs and drinking a lot of coffee during the day and driving eight hours between shows on my own across Europe in the winter. Um, and I think I've been doing it for too long anyway. So uh when it did actually come to take an enforced break, um, I was quite happy.

SPEAKER_00 3:43

Hmm.

SPEAKER_03 3:44

I think for a lot of people, didn't it? It just it basically gave space and time to actually take stock and listen to yourself and listen to I mean, this is a massively hippie thing to say, but basically listen to your body as well, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 4:00

And you're yeah, I think for a lot well that interspersed with you know short periods of we're all gonna die. Yeah, sort of this is the mind. I'm starting to feel quite relaxed, but the end of the world is nigh. Um, yeah, so you know, a mixture of stuff. But I you know, in terms of yeah, personal health and mental health, it was uh it was a good uh recalibration. Uh but I'm very glad to be back at it. Um but I don't drink I don't drink anymore. I don't think that's really related to COVID. I think just sort of turning 50 and being a dad and being a busy is that when it happened though? Is that when you cut the um I stopped three years ago, so it was really just a a dry annuary gone wrong. Um I just it just uh me and my partner Ella had uh would do dry annual every year and just you know have a little bit of a detox and I was just enjoying it more, I think. Um you know I did some oh it's terribly name-droppy, but uh I did some shows with Bonnie Raitt recently and I was chatting to her because I know she doesn't drink anymore, and she just said for her, like she just didn't want to be sloppy, like she loves playing, loves touring, and you know, she seems super frustrated when she can't. I know she recently had an arm injury and she couldn't tour. She she just wants to play, she wants to be in front of people, she wants to play, and she wants to be good. And I think she felt that alcohol was making her a bit sloppy, and I think Yeah, I think at times that you know I'd rather be super focused than in the room, and and and also it changed the game for me a little bit in terms of you know, if you're always used to having a couple of beers before you play in front of a few hundred people, um that that's your that's your process, you're locked into it. Um, and so you know, it was a little bit terrifying going back completely sober for the first few um first few shows. Um, but now uh yeah, it's great. I feel much more focused, I feel like I'm better, I feel like I'm more present, I can drive to and from all my shows, you know. Yeah, it's not uh yeah, it's not for everybody. I I don't I wouldn't criticize anyone in either direction, but for me it's it's working out pretty well for now.

SPEAKER_03 6:28

Um we talked about this a lot in Switzerland, didn't we? And that was a sort of a talking point. I seem to remember you going for a swim in in the lake and other such healthy um things, rather than maybe where musicians would meet in that scenario and would be looking to go on a drunken adventure. Do you know what I mean? It's like, do you want to go for a swim at six in the morning? It's like but I do you do you think and I don't know if this is just because I've got some massively out-of-check, um, out-of-control musician's ego. Um but for me personally, I I think there's so much, so much of a construct of what a musician and a creative person is, and that is playing and drinking. Not that that's the reason I or you or anyone drinks, but it's sort of you're sort of playing into a sort of a goic construct. But when you reach a particular age, and then you actually you're comfortable to go, oh you know, no, no, I don't I don't need to do that.

SPEAKER_02 7:36

No, music's the drug. Uh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's it. I I totally agree. So, you know, as I as I mentioned, I'm 50 and I grew up, you know, probably listening to you know Guns N' Roses and Black Sabbath and and whatever, like rock and roll was it. To be rock and roll, you drink whiskey, you smoke, you wear a leather jacket, and you know, the relevant parts of that are that there was no social media, there was no way to meet other people. Like the trick was you wear your Iron Maiden t-shirt, your Black Sabbath t-shirt, and you go and walk around the town centre, and you see someone else who's wearing an ACDC t-shirt or a black Sabbath t-shirt, you go and talk to them because you found your people, and you probably go for a beer, and that's how you found your people. Now it's so much easier, right? You have these social networks, although I have mixed feelings about that anyway. Um, but I think rock and roll was those things you had to go and have a few beers to meet people, find a girlfriend, find a boyfriend. Um, everything happened in the pub. Like, um, and I think it was cooler when we were younger. Rock and roll was cool. Um and I see it, you know, with nieces and nephews and and and and younger people that I know. Um, it's just not as cool anymore. Like, it's not cool to smoke. No one thinks no one sees someone smoking now and goes, that guy's cool. They're like, What a loser. Like, that's you know, that's why why would you do that? People seem fitter, so in some respects, you know, healthier. Obviously, you know, there are other factors going on in our super comfortable food arriving to the door, kind of uh, you know, uh lifestyle.

SPEAKER_03 9:17

For sure. But the healthy musician is like is is a thing, isn't it? It's it's like like especially with the world that you're in, Mine, like the idea of a of a blues man being like oh no, I go to the gym three times a week and I eat it organically. It's like that that because it is that that legend and that myth and that um what is the word is Cliche? It's not well, um oh man, I really want uh well it's like idiosyncrasies, but it's the the sort of you know it's the stereotype, but also like the fashion, the attitude, like punk, right? There's there's clothes and there's there's political views and there's a way of a way of being and and um but perhaps punk is a good example, right?

SPEAKER_02 10:05

Because punk is sort of anti-establishment and it's great, but actual punk was a fairly short window of time, and it was great because it got people thinking in a different way. Let's be independent, let's work outside the existing systems. But if you hang on to that for 30 years, there's nothing less punk than still walking around dressing like a punk. That's the most anti-punk thing you can do, right? And so the uh the idea of the drinking blues, man, it is good, you know. And I and when I was a kid, I did that stuff, you know. I bought into it, and that's I got into loads of adventures, and I probably still did go swimming in the lake at six in the morning. I just might not think except you were drunk. That's amazing. Yeah, I might not have been to bed. I never really felt like I let uh drinking get in the way of having those adventures and doing those things, and um, but I did. I stayed up late, I met people, I may probably made some bad decisions, but I've got some killer memories. Um but I think just as time goes on, do I want to be still awake at four o'clock in the bar, um, you know, shooting the shit with someone I've met at the gig? Um, or do I want to go home, get a good night's rest, wake up feeling good, see the place I'm in, maybe go to a museum, do some of that stuff. I've done the other thing, I've done it loads, I've met awesome people, I've got a bunch of songs out of it, but um, I'm just enjoying different things. Um, and I want to be awake and present for those things. Um, and I want to be doing this when I'm 80 years old. This is not a job you retire from, and I don't want that decision to be taken away from me because I've made lifestyle choices that perhaps make it impossible.

SPEAKER_03 11:51

Well, that's so grown up.

SPEAKER_02 11:56

It is one of the most grown-up things I've ever said. Immortalized on your podcast now.

SPEAKER_03 12:01

There's there's so much, so much truth in it. I I did uh like um a youth music sort of advisory board, I don't know how you would uh do it, but we were it was musicians, and we were uh sort of trying to, I suppose, talk about being a musician and saying to young people, this is what I've learned, and you know, I think that you'll find this helpful. And I really had to think about what I would say, you know, as as sort of advice or something that I've definitely learned. And I I came to the conclusion that actually the best advice I've got is to be financially savvy. But it just I mean, it's just been such a big thing all all through your my life is that sort of the more desperate I am to make money, the sometimes the what the the more negative effect that has on creativity because the more the the the less need I have to make money from the the art I make, the less I I have to consider other people and I can just make music and art. Do you know what I mean? And whereas you know, if you're financially secure, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how well your next track does or whatever.

SPEAKER_02 13:17

Yeah, I guess th there's a few questions there. I mean I did a talk at my daughter's school, so they have a you know, you know, the RAF come in and the police force come in and they say, Here, you know, this is this is what we do, and they invited me in to talk.

SPEAKER_03 13:35

And so I bet that would have been so much cooler if you turned up in the days where you had a roleie hanging out of your mouth and a bottle of whiskey in the other hand, you were like, This is my dad!

SPEAKER_02 13:44

They wouldn't have let me through the doors. Um but yeah, a similar thing. Um if you're relying on music as your income, there is a dangerous seesaw there because if what you're doing is is consistently successful and you're following a format that does make money, then the creativity may well suffer because you're not going to take as big a risks. Um so I I do think that the most important thing that I probably said in that talk, and that I could say to people that are being creative in any way, shape, or form, is fail. Fail a lot, fail spectacularly, and and and uh understand that that is entirely part of the process. Do things that don't work, um, even if it's writing a little ditty on a piece of paper, um and you know, throw it away, don't show it to anyone, be creative, but let those things not be successful. You don't have to make everything you do successful and financially successful. If you do, I don't think it will be that great. Um, I think you have to allow yourself to change, you have to be open to ideas. Um, you know, I spent a lot of time with books like uh The Creative Act, um, which I think is really good. Um uh I'm trying to remember his name now. Tetragramaton, he's got a podcast. It's gonna annoy me now. Uh Rick Rubin. Rick Rubin's book.

SPEAKER_03 15:23

Oh, the big grey book. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:25

Yeah, I got stuck into that, man. That's amazing. I think there's some good advice in in that about, you know, um once you do the thing, it's out in the world. You've you've done the creative thing, right? Um and that is writing the song. Yeah, once you've recorded it, you you've made a postcard and you're out selling that postcard to the world. That little snapshot of where that song was at that on that day, right? You're out there touring it and sort of selling that. That's a different sport. That should be successful. Like when you're putting together a tour and you're in front of people and you're taking people's money, you should be out there delivering, being good. You can be creative and you can improvise um with the with the songs that you have. I love going to see artists who don't play the same song twice and don't tell the same stories every night. Um, you know, but the creative thing, you have to be okay with failure because it's gonna happen a lot, and if you're gonna get better, that's where you're gonna do all your learning. If you constantly just hang out in that middle ground where people are like sort of pat you on the back and go, Oh, yeah, that's good. That sounds like one of your songs, and and don't occasionally take a leap, you know, far left or far right. Um, you know, I I I think that can stifle the creativity.

SPEAKER_03 16:49

Interesting. So Mike, to link that to slide playing, I would love to talk about the the difference between slide and playing, you know, fretted, if you like. Um because I think lots of people that listen to this, I I reckon the majority are going to be people who have never played slide or have and you know only dabbled and put it away. And I think aside from like this, I think that sometimes there's almost a cultural thing of like seeing slide guitar playing as like a totally different thing, and you know, you you need some kind of validation to get into it, and if you've maybe really quite good at guitar, but then your slide game is going to be really terrible, you don't want to sort of mix them up. But uh do you do you think there's something about the the imperfection of slides? So I've just spent a lot of time playing fretless guitar, for example, and a big thing of that is getting comfortable with playing a note that may not be you know well, I I yeah, I I'm trying to use the right word because obviously I'm striving to be in two, but actually I'm enjoying I'm I'm enjoying intonating notes slightly differently, and it's like the edge of chaos or something, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 18:18

And there's a sort of uh a create there's a creativity to that, and go on, you you I was look the instruments that we play, or the way I perceive the instruments that I play is they are tools for self-expression, right? I want to write songs and tell stories, and I want those instruments to play into that narrative, right? So sometimes scruffy is great, scruffy is good. If that's what the song wants, that's okay. But one preconception about slide guitar that really annoys me is that a lot of people um go loose and scruffy um all the time, right? Because they sort of think it's authentic to sort of crash and bang and just do these big 12 threat slides.

SPEAKER_03 19:49

And um can you show me what you mean by loose and sloughy and that's loose and slough?

SPEAKER_02 19:58

I'm yeah, I'm playing on a wires and porn, but it's the same. I mean, I open detuning, right? And so uh a lot of people might just be like and it's okay, it's okay, it's cool.

SPEAKER_03 20:18

Um it's sort of percussive, and it's not thinking about perfection of of uh pitch, it's just it's just sort of the force of it.

Marker 1

SPEAKER_02 20:26

It's just you you just hear a lot of people just don't go past those initial octave sort of slides, you know, the sort of Elmore Dames just my dust my broom, which is great, it's brilliant, it tells the story of that song, but like he's done that, that's great, and hearing it 10,000 times doesn't m what make it any better for me. Like hearing 10,000 people trying to play like Stevie Ray Vaughan, it's it it doesn't work. We all have influences. I'm hugely influenced by Kelly Joe Phelps, um, you know, and I think you can hear that in my playing, but I don't try and replicate him, I try and take what he thought were important values. Like in fact, he said, you know, like as a slide player, I think sometimes people punish you for sort of trying to be good, like making your intonation better, making it cleaner. But what I loved about him was he was always looking for different chords, so as opposed to just doing like a one, four, five, so he'd look for you know he looked for different chords. How do we make them interesting instead of just uh having the slide playing across all the strings? Let's tip it up, let's isolate single notes.

SPEAKER_03 22:12

Okay, so the the slide isn't just flat across all strings, playing whole open chords. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 22:18

If you if you partially cover uh the strings, for example, uh on the seventh front. So you've got three open strings, three closed. If you're just playing your big open D chord, but you're tipping that slide up and just picking out uh parts of a simple kind of major melodies. So you've got those, but you play the chord underneath. Or you you pedal on this if you're an open D, you've got two D's on the bottom there, so you can keep your rhythm. Still using those same major notes at the top. Um so yeah, he was yeah, he was just all about keeping the rhythm, playing the melody. He also sang fantastically and wrote wrote great songs. Um but yeah, so having an instrument where the intonation isn't always perfect, yeah, you know, that's okay, but it can be good still, and I think maybe some people get to a certain point with slide playing and just sort of stop. Um, you know. Um and I don't know how you get over that. I mean, for me, just being obsessed with the limitation of the instrument is the best way I can explain it to me. Uh explain how I see it. Is that I'm happy to sit in a room and repetitively play little phrases or improvise around a very simple theme for quite long periods of time. I I I don't struggle with concentrating on that and I don't find it boring. I find it fascinating.

SPEAKER_03 24:17

Um Do you think that's because of the element of variety that you can more so with slide? If you play three notes, there's uh an infinite spectrum of possibilities, whereas if I fret the note da-da-da, it's pretty much gonna be the same beyond maybe the the right hand, you know.

SPEAKER_02 24:35

Yeah, or it's just that by repetition you get more comfortable, you get more muscle memory, and when you're playing a song, there's just more you're expanding your vocabulary slowly, and you're constantly evolving your technique, even if that technique is just playing more simply sometimes, doing what a song needs. I find that doing those repetitive things just um makes me more confident. I'm not on the edge of like my abilities, I'm not trying to push for a you know uh something I might not get. You know, I'm just my muscles are used to it. And yeah, when I'm when I'm playing a show, it's like, yeah, I I don't go ahead off piste with this, you know, and all those um all the time you spent practicing and isolating those little things. Um I think they pay dividends. But I think I'm I'm more maybe I'm more leaning on the fact that the way my brain is, which is probably true of a lot of musicians, maybe uh, you know, a little bit spectrumy in that we really like doing repetitive things constantly for long periods of time. It's only when I talk to other musicians who do the they do this stuff too, like whether they're drummers or whatever, they sit around and practice, they love it, right? And then you talk to someone who's a non-musician, they're like, hang on, you sit in a room and you do the same thing for four hours, doesn't that drive you mentor, and you suddenly realize, oh okay, it's not for everyone. So maybe it's just something about how I I'm wired that makes me um just fascinated, obsessed. I'm I'm not trying to reach a goal, I'm not trying to be like I don't I don't want to go to shows and someone goes, You're the best I've ever seen.

SPEAKER_03 26:23

Um, I want someone It's nice when they say that though, Martin, right?

SPEAKER_02 26:28

Well, you can't you can't take that stuff on board. If someone says you're the best guitar player they've ever seen, you might be the best guitar player they've ever seen. But in my heart, I want to go, yeah, but go and check this guy or this guy or this guy that I listened to. Um, but I also don't want to rob the person of having a good time at the show. But yeah, compliments are hard, aren't they, as a musician? Because you can't start believing what either people write about you or what people say about you. You would be intolerable as a human being. Um, I want someone to say that guy was present. Um he was into it, and he was he was he was giving us something and he was sharing, you know, and and like playing to an audience is a completely different thing from playing in a room on your own or or playing on a record. You're having a conversation, we're all at the same show, you know. I want to talk to my audience, I want to know what they're interested by, I want them to ask questions. It's no such thing as a stupid question, you know. Someone asked at a show where I was playing with a wonderful double bass player um called Mark Lewis. They're like, How do you make the notes on the double bass? And some of the audience sort of giggled because it was maybe they're musicians or it seemed sort of stupid, but to me, that's the most wonderful question that someone has sat in a room, right, and they're looking at a double bass, and they honestly have no idea how the sounds that are coming out of it, which they clearly enjoy and are wonderful, they have no idea how they're made. And to me, that's magic, right? Isn't it like someone is doing something and you have no idea how that is happening? And just to ask a simple question and have that explained, was really cool, but it also just demonstrates that you know we're all nerd out about the finer details of this, that, and the other. But when you go and see music, it's people expressing themselves with other people to other people. What a cool experience, what a shared experience.

SPEAKER_03 28:24

Love that for sure, man. Yeah, mu as musicians, we we can sometimes forget the magical element that it has for people watching it because they have no actual understanding of how it's being created, and but it's just because we understand all those intricacies, it kind of can strip away the well, yeah, it strips away the illusion a bit, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_02 28:51

Really have you have you ever been to a show where you've complimented the musician and they've said something back to you like, ah yeah, but I I screwed up the second verse and constantly wasn't my best show. See, that really bothers me because it when people when someone has yeah, sometimes got the courage to come up and talk to you, yeah, because people are you know, people are nervous about talking to to other people sometimes, and certainly about you know paying a compliment or appearing unqualified to do so, right? When someone comes up and goes, Man, that was amazing, that moved me, and then the the art and then the artist says something like wasn't my best, last night was better, or yeah, I made some mistakes. To be honest, I was in a terrible place. I'm like, don't say that, say thanks, because you're robbing that person of the experience that they've just they've just had, and as far as they're concerned, that's the coolest thing you know they've seen or heard.

SPEAKER_03 29:48

So um I think that's excellent advice, man. I I I should try and take that because yeah, my tendency well, I I do consciously always say thank you, but quite often um I've genuinely been dying inside my head whilst I'm playing that show. And like honestly, honestly, I even though I love performing so often, like my inner monologue is really really negative, man.

SPEAKER_02 30:13

Join the club, so is mine.

SPEAKER_03 30:17

You know that you're not meant to be here, Martin.

SPEAKER_02 30:19

We all I'd like yeah, there's plenty of people who I'm sure have wonderfully uh you know impenetrable egos that don't think like we do. But my internal critic is like you know, someone could do this better, or you know, even you know, that joke didn't land, that that that bit where you improvised, that went wrong. You're a loser, you shouldn't be here. Um that's always there. Like we have to make friends with that, but that's part of our job, you know, whether you're an actor or or whatever. Like people have paid their 20 quid to come and see you, they don't want to know the inner workings of your mind, not unless they really ask, right?

SPEAKER_03 31:00

They don't want to know that you're gonna be crying home on the M3 on the way back at three in the morning. Thanks very much, yeah. But I will be crying for the uh the duration of the journey home. But I do appreciate it. Would you like to buy an album?

SPEAKER_02 31:13

Um would you like to buy an album of of of stuff which I recorded three years ago, which I hate and I never listened to it?

SPEAKER_03 31:19

Yes, yes, yes, yes, that's that's the yeah, it's not it's not good, is it?

SPEAKER_02 31:24

No, but it is important though, because you know, when when people start out, like there is, you know, you've uh embrace failure and and and that internal critic doesn't go away. I know lots of people who are super successful, uh, play on huge stages uh under huge amounts of pressure, and they play with some of you know the finest folks in the world. They have the same issues, they just um you know you have to find ways to deal with them or you can't move forward. And most of the time it turns out okay. You've got to be kind to yourself as well. You got up and you played a show today there's probably 50 people um for every one person that didn't play a show today because they let the internal critic be too loud and it stopped them actually sitting on a chair and expressing themselves in front of other people at the risk of someone not liking it or someone um you know uh agreeing with your internal critic, the the worry that someone's gonna come up and and vocalise the voice you've got in your head, you know, that that that would be terrifying and crushing. Someone came up and went that second first kind of sucked. I've seen you a few times, and this is definitely the worst. You know. Um, I we are we are critical, and I think uh being self-critical does help you get better, maybe as a form of defense. Um maybe that's not good. I I'm not sure. But I think you do need a toolkit to go out there and be creative in front of people, and you know, I I don't harp on about not not not drinking because there's there's there's probably lots of other mental changes that uh you know uh uh or just ways of thinking that have changed anyway that might have led to that. But I just don't give myself a hard time. If you have a gig, maybe the sound's not great, you're like, oh, I don't feel like either the the sound uh represents me, or I don't feel like I've given an amazing account of myself this evening. I'm not gonna cry on the A3 about it, I or the M3 in your case. Um I am just gonna go. I got up, I did it, it's a gig. There's gonna be another one tomorrow. I do a hundred of these a year. It's like I can't I can't let that crush my spirit for making music. Like I have to recognise that it's there. I think we all have that voice, but uh you know, I think uh yeah. Just just give yourself a break.

SPEAKER_03 34:07

Okay. That's good. That's good. That's very very universal and helpful advice, I think. So with with that confidence thing in mind, then going back to slide, and I was trying to express earlier that I think a lot of people, myself included, really love the sound of slide. Really, I mean, even just you demoing you know, a few minutes there of something, it's such a visceral, beautiful sound, especially in your hands.

SPEAKER_02 34:43

It's better in my hands than in my feet.

SPEAKER_03 34:45

That's for sure. Do you try that sometimes? Um so but having the confidence to bring that into a my my sort of repertoire, or and for other players as well, being maybe maybe they're pretty darn good at finger picking, and but then it's this bringing slide in, it seems like it's like like switching an instrument or something. Do you do you th what what's a nice way to sort of access slide, do you think, and to sort of be able to well, I mean, look firstly it go it goes both ways.

SPEAKER_02 35:23

Like I play a lot of slide, but if you ask me to do like a bunch of uh yeah you know um you know passing chords or play a jazz progression, like it's not there. I've spent my time on this instrument, right? So you know that's if you're looking to get into slide and you want to do some you know simple stuff, it's the first thing uh is is the tuning of the guitar, right? I I'm currently playing across my lap, but I can read playing anything really.

SPEAKER_03 35:53

Um yeah, go on, show it, show us a standard, a normal guitar.

SPEAKER_02 35:59

So I've got a resonator here which is really set up for we're gonna guitar. I've got to try and find a slide knocking around this room. There probably is one, but um how are we doing by the way?

SPEAKER_03 36:11

We we still recording and stuff, is everything still rolling on your end? That's good.

SPEAKER_02 36:19

So I'm taking a national it's set up it's set up to play regularly because I like the sort of I like the sort of jazzy progressions on the on the on the rezos, but so if you take your low E, turn it down, tune it down to D, then take the G string down at F sharp, next string down at A, i e down to D. And that some people tune to to a G. I tune to open D because I play on my own quite a lot, and I like having that low bass note, you know, so that I can finger pick with that, and I would just, yeah, it's I I'm now putting a glass bottleneck on my finger. Before when you heard me play, I was playing across my lap with something called a tone bar, which is a heavy bit of brass or steel.

SPEAKER_03 37:24

Um this is always on your little finger as well, Chris.

SPEAKER_02 37:27

But yeah, this this one is glass, it's always on my little finger. A lot of people play with on their third finger. I think there's a great argument that you can get a stronger tone from your third finger because it's just a bigger bit of meat, if you like. I generally think you're probably more dexterous with your third finger. Um, but I like having three fingers uh available um for other chords, so you so that my five chord can be um you know I can do that. I need three fingers to do that.

SPEAKER_03 38:01

So you're just to describe what you're doing audibly, you're you're actually fretting a chord behind then like exactly.

SPEAKER_02 38:08

So the difference, so if you're starting and you're a regular guitar player, maybe you don't want to just flip an instrument across your lap like like I do um uh and start with your regular guitar. So, yeah, the tuning is the first thing. We a lot of people do and can play slide in open tuning, but uh I I personally think it's easier to start with an open chord simply because that thing I mentioned earlier, you're just covering all strings. You can pretty much cover all the strings and just start getting a feel for it. You know, my criticism of that style earlier is not that you shouldn't do that, it's just you shouldn't do that and stop there because there's so much more on offer. So I would just look at single notes over over your open chord, so wherever you tune to. Yeah, so round about an open Dick in simple um, maybe just a major scale.

SPEAKER_03 39:27

So you're just playing a open low note, letting the chord resonate. Yeah, and then choosing those.

SPEAKER_02 39:41

When you're playing slide on a regular guitar, certainly if you set it up, you know, it's set up as a regular guitar, you are gonna get these clacks and and bangs off the fret. It's the second string can help you sometimes avoid the the high E rattle that you're doing. But yeah, there's the amount of pressure you put on a slide is something that you're only gonna get by by practicing. Um I don't think you're instantly just sort of gonna jump on and just be really great at slide. You're you're limiting how many fingers you use, you've got to recalibrate a lot of different things. But you know, when you're starting, I mean the the thing I heard that that got me going on slide was probably the you the the soundtrack to Paris, Texas by Ray Cuda.

SPEAKER_03 40:37

It's it's sim simplicity, right? Is that sort of rather than trying to do lots of things at once, just that sort of is that is that fair?

SPEAKER_02 40:47

Yeah, I mean I think yeah, just find a slide that fits on your finger. Um there's a world of choice. Some people like a heavy brass slide. The problem with that is that it's gonna make more noise against the fret, it's gonna um it's gonna bash against your frets a bit more, uh, it's gonna be a little bit harder to get it sounding clean. The advantage of a heavier slide is it's gonna give you more sustain, probably a little bit more volume. Um, I like to keep the instruments with which I play the bottleneck, the glass slide on, so that I can still fret, so the actions are quite low, therefore having quite a light slide means that I can make the notes a little bit cleaner without too much of this. But I might be playing, you know, I might play a mixture uh of just you know say finger style. So I'm there sort of uh pedaling on the on the 2Ds, playing with my fingers that don't have the slide on. So you don't you don't have to be sliding all the time, you know it's a flavour that you that you're adding. Like does the does the song you're writing, does the piece you're writing, does does it need it, does it need to be slide all the time? Do you would you know rather play some straightforward chords a bit one more and then yeah? So I think a combination with bottleneck, that's the really nice thing about bottleneck, is you can uh uh there's more choice in the textures and the sounds you can make because you can get to more chords if you're playing across your lap, the wiserborn style that I was playing first off, it's harder to find passing chords, it's harder to find minors without retuning the guitar entirely. So I think for that reason, taking your regular guitar, tune it to an open D or an open G, and just experimenting with covering all the strings, what sound does that make, and then trying to isolate single notes, not just the top E, but sort of working down through through a major scale across the strings. That was a terrible one. Just isolate some single notes so you can throw them in there, you know, when you need them.

SPEAKER_03 44:05

Beautiful man. I feel that chord was the perfect place to finish.

SPEAKER_02 44:12

Um but yeah, you know, when you're starting out, it's just just have some just have some fun. I think, yeah, I I feel like it is a little bit of a diversion. Some guitar players may be getting bored thinking I want to try to slide out. And I think you you know, you sort of dip in and dip out. I certainly didn't come out of the gate as a slide player. I sort of it's slowly developed. I just those wonderful haunting melodies like you know, Ryakuda's soundtrack to Paris, Texas, and the wonderful vocal quality, the a lot of gospel slide guitar players, you know, they were called sacred steel players, the sun. Times when you didn't have a female vocalist in a gospel band, you would have uh a steel player, like you know, playing across his lap, quite often using swells on the tone knob to make it sort of wa pre-war days, and they just wonderful gospel uh singer licks on these instruments. I and I, you know, hearing that kind of stuff was really inspiring. Uh, you know, obviously um Derek Trucks is a great exponent of that sort of style, it's very human voice-like. Um, and so yeah, moving moving out of that basic sort of slide guitar is blues sort of thing. You know, when you start off everyone's like, slide guitar's blues, it's Robert Johnson, it's the crossroads, it's Muddy Waters. But then there are people like Debashis Pachichar playing wonderful Mohan uh Venus or Chattarangi's, the Indian version of the slide guitar. Um, and you know, there's so many, you know, it's in country, it's in Western Swing. Uh, you've got the Dobro, you know, wonderful exponents of that, like Jerry Douglas, who has an amazing ability to play around vocalists and play numerous styles and and and to improvise, um, you know, in a spectacular way. So slide isn't just the blues, it's a good place to start because the format of the blues can be quite simple, the finer points much more complicated, but yeah, blues is a good place to start. But I would certainly urge people who are listening, um, you know, think about taking up slide to you know to listen to some some of the Indian stuff as well, and um you know, just see where Slide turns up and and what it can do. Um, you know, I think there's a lot of inspiring slide players out there um that aren't straight ahead blues players.

SPEAKER_03 46:46

I think that's great, man. I think that's really exciting to to hear almost the sort of validation that go and go and play some slide and take it somewhere different, you know.

SPEAKER_02 46:58

I can't do the Indian thing, but just they just you know sort of approximation, but you know, just trying those little you know those different flavors in, whether they'd be Eastern or And you know, in in gospel there's more of you know, I don't know. There's lots of flavours, there's lots of ways to go. If it can be sung, it can be played on the slide guitar, right? It's this it's that wonderful thing of almost a fretless instrument I know you're familiar with, but just you know, the the delineation between the notes, you're not you don't have to cross over a fret, you've got that smooth vocal quality to it, and you know, and and vibrato as well. I mean you'll hear a lot of slide players talk about vibrato, you'll hear D.D. King saying he was trying to emulate Buckler White's slide vibrato. You'll hear Derek Trucks talking about you know which sort of vocalists had certain kinds of vibrato and um you know. It just makes it a very expressive vocal instrument.

SPEAKER_03 48:37

Beautiful. Mine, thank you so much. No worries, man. It was nice talking to you.