Welcome to the “Beginner Slide Guitar” series Episode 2. Today we are looking at the classic rock/blues song, “Bad to the Bone,” by George Thorogood and the Destroyers. This song leads us to the topic of tuning.
Opened Tunings and slide
A prevalent and convenient technique with slide guitar is open tunings. This is where the guitar is tuned to a chord when all strings are played open. The most common open tunings are open E, D, G, and A. We won’t dive too deep into all the different tunings, but Open E tuning, like the others, when all strings are strummed open, makes an E major chord. Less common but just as fun is to tune them to the minor, but that’s a topic for another day. Bad to the Bone is tuned to open G. Opened G tuning, from lowest to highest string, is tuned ‘D G D G B D.’ The song is in the key of G and sounds a lot more advanced and impressive than the guitar playing actually is.
The Main Lick
The main lick of the song is repeated throughout the song. Sometimes the guitar fully drops out, other times the guitar adds some small leads around this lick. But it’s the general phrase the entire song is built upon.
Right after the intro, where the lick is played like 4 times in a row, they start to introduce some slight lead to the phrases. These leads are super simple but extremely powerful. Remember we are in our open tuning, which makes this type of playing very simple, compared to slide-in standard tuning.
Master the main phrase, then play around peppering in these little lead parts, while keeping the main phrase in time. For the lead notes, you want to approach it with the mindset of outlining the different chords, as opposed to playing out of a scale. the 11 to 12th fret slide is incredibly powerful. Here’s a backing track in G to practice your slide guitar lead improvising. If you have any questions or comments drop them below and we will try to answer them as soon as possible.
