No worries; I’ll will do my due diligence next time and find a slide virtuoso. Someone who has a micro-bevelled custom finger-size fit tempered glass slide. Someone who has not only studied the Robert Johnson method of what is often ignorantly referred to as accidental clanking noise when the player’s slide hits a fret awkwardly, but someone who can also faithfully reproduce that sound at a specific velocity as dependant on the weight of dynamics and harmonic movement in preceding bars. In fact a slide guitar virtuoso who can guarantee that all collateral noises, buzzing, fret rutting, dead string sounds and accidental note clips in their performance are deliberate and backed up with notation and transcription examples showing their historical context. I knew I should have got someone like this from the start. Precision at all costs, particularly with those incidental sounds. I understand that there is a ratio of incidental mechanical noises based on tempo and true note density and should have realised that only someone who has a thorough technical understanding of these ratios would be appropriate otherwise the music will inevitably have little true substance. Did you give much thought to the historical context of that buzzing sound? Have you any peer reviewed written evidence that a true slide master would have played what you played in the last half of bar 10, chorus 14 in the context of this songs harmonic movement and tempo? Have you actually written any papers examining Son House’ use of incidental slide noises in a spirtual context or as metaphorical good vs evil survey? No, I didn’t think so.
Continue reading “I’m such a shit slide player. Sorry about that.”
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Music With My Insane Friend