"A Slideways Glance" by David Kilpatrick

A Slideways Glance

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Some of the travel guitars I import and sell have such a high action I can't sell them - but then I discovered slide playing!

singer songwriter acoustic folk british guitarist song celtic traditional fingerstyle scottish scotland guitar kelso

David Kilpatrick

Solo singer-songwriter and tunesmith playing British fingerstyle steel and nylon string guitar, and historic instruments. Scots and Irish influences.

I've been writing and playing songs and tunes since teenage years in folk clubs and pubs. I co-organise the Kelso Friday night live music sessions at the Cross Keys (hosted singaround 7.45-10pm) and Cobbles Inn (10-12pm open mic with The Cobbles Band) with the help of many friends. All welcome! Visit us at kelsofolkandlive co uk. It is worth clicking on the tab because the sound quality of my tracks is far higher than the auto player on this page. Many can be streamed or downloaded at 320KBps and the enhancement for solo guitar/voice far exceeds the benefit you get for highly compressed band recordings. My recordings are full dynamic, not compressed. Just select Hi-Fi for the first song, and an MP3 high bitrate window will open - you will still get a sequence of songs. Most of my downloads are free, but some 320KBps tracks are paid-for. These are selected because they make up my main instrumental album. I now have a YouTube page and have started doing some video recordings for fun: @daviddkilpatrick I have mainly played Lowden guitars since 1999. I current play a 1985 S5FN (nylon string), 1986 S22 (jumbo O-size mahogany/cedar), and 1995 S32 (small body rosewood/spruce). I also play my own 1997-built Martin 'kit' Grand Auditorium rosewood/spruce, a Sigma OM-T, Furch Little Jane, Tacoma Papoose, Guild 8-string baritone, Vintage V880 parlour guitar and Gordon Giltrap signature model, a Troubadour mahogany/spruce classical and an Adam Black 12-string. And that's just the guitars... also viola, mandolin, mandola, waldzither, bouzouki, Appalachian dulcimer, low D whistle, keyboards.

Song Info

Genre

Acoustic • Acoustic Guitar

Charts

Peak #45

Peak in subgenre #16

Author

David Kilpatrick

Rights

David Kilpatrick 2005

Uploaded

December 03, 2005

Track Files

MP3

MP3 5.6 MB • 192 kbps • 4:06

Story behind the song

I import travel guitars, which I call Blondel cittern guitars, from Romania. Their quality control is poor, and I weed out unsaleable instruments. After two years I had a dozen of these with half inch high action (yes, they can manage it, usually an entire box at a time). Someone suggested they would make great lap slide guitars, having a flat fingerboard and being shaped about the same as a lap guitar. So I tuned one up to open G (Dobro) and had a go. I have never played slide before, though I know the principles, and all I had with a bottleneck type brass tube slide which is not ideal for lap playing (a solid, heavy, shaped lap steel slide is much better). Anywhere, here is an improvisation on a Scottish theme. The ornamentation and the technique involves using the slide to touch just a single string much of the time, and very rarely the whole six. Many chords are played just on the bottom three or four strings, and campanella technique is used with open strings and these partial chords. The slide is hammered on or tapped on the string for some notes. It's a bit noisy (two condensor mics really pick up the slide noise) and the pipe drone is a Clavinova string tone playing a constant G. Drone organ or strings works particularly well with slide guitar.