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Ringing with slide

I’m new to CBG playing and I’m learning to play slide blues. However when I have to hammer on, especially to my low G string, I get a lot of ringing. This ringing drowns out the effect of the hammer. I’ve tried slides of various materials to no avail. I suspect it’s down to my infantile slide technique, but I would appreciate any tips. I am endeavouring to do justice to Shane’s excellent teaching sessions.

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Permalink Reply by Southern Ray on March 21, 2020 at 7:38am

I had a similar problem when learning slide. Do you use a trailing finger on the headstock side of the slide to mute that side of the strings? The strings on the headstock side of the slide should be still, not vibrating, hence the "trailing finger". I hope that makes sense.

Ray

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Permalink Reply by Michael Myers on March 21, 2020 at 7:45am

I appreciate that, but surely the string has to be vibrating open in order to hammer on.

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Permalink Reply by Southern Ray on March 21, 2020 at 9:20am

Aw! I guess I was still asleep when I said that.

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Permalink Reply by Taffy Evans on March 21, 2020 at 2:34pm

Hi Michael, I don't see how you can get around what you are hearing. I play a lot of slide blues but never have I used the hammer on effect in my "bottle neck style" of playing, nor have I noticed it in the video's and records I have of 'bottle neck" slide players both old and new.

When I hammer on using my acoustic or electric guitars, playing fingers not slide, the action is to pick the string and "hammer" down on that string pushing it down to the fret while it is still vibrating so that it will sound the fretted note, also. This gives you two or more quick notes in rapid succession.

The difference I think is, when doing this action with the finger the string is momentarily muted [stopped vibrating] just prior to hitting the fret. This gives a clean sounding note.
However when doing this with a slide there is no dampening of the string, so the slide/fret will hit a vibrating string, that's the rattle/ringing you hear.

To test this you can set the string into motion and slowly bring the slide into contact with it, what you will hear is buzzing sound as the string rattles against the slide on contact.

Having said all that lap slide players who use a heavy bar use heaps of hammer on licks/effects, I do too, and it takes practice to overcome a lot of that noise. Its more noticeable on the bass wound strings as they are looser and vibrate more. I use much heavier strings 16 to 56 on my six string reso.

I don't know if this helps
Taff