What with the football, a week in the Lake District, a number of weekends away and the general stream of transcribing, guitar-magazining and bluesjamtracking, I just haven’t really done much guitar playing recently. That is to say, I always have a guitar to hand when I’m transcribing and I’ve practised stuff for the magazine CD, but that’s all very specifically focused; I’m talking about deep, intense playing.

cigar box guitarPart of my problem is that I’m lazy. Another part of my problem is a very short attention span, especially when it comes to familiar old practice routines. The best way to make me work hard is to give me a new challenge. I’ve long intended to develop my slide playing, but was always confronted with a dilemma… whether to struggle with my clumsy technique on guitars set up with low action, or whether to tweak a guitar for slide, thus making it ineligible for “standard” duties.

Fortuitously, a solution arrived from (sweet home) Alabama, as you can see in the picture. This cheery little chap was built for me by my good friend Bill Jehle. As well as being a damn fine player, Bill has recently been investigating the fine old American tradition of the cigar box guitar. He’s already built quite a few examples and made an instructional DVD, so check out his website… BellyJelly Music.

So anyway… this is now my designated slide guitar. At the moment, I’m really just trying to build a solid, accurate technique (honestly, I’m working from a starting point of roughly 2% competence) so there won’t be any actual recordings just yet. I’m mostly working on intonation, improvising to little chord loops. Also, I have a tendency to lazily allow the bottleneck to pivot against the high E string, creating a very rattly contact with the B and G strings, so I’m working on developing a feel for angling it most effectively according to the string I’m playing. I love the way you can radically alter the tone by adjusting the way the slide connects with the string. More updates soon!