what tuning did alan wilson use for slide

#What tuning did alan wilson use for slide how to#

It gave Son House a career again and he kept playing till he retired again in 1974 after being rediscovered by a new generation. Wilson knew his old records and licks and taught them to Son House who relearned them.

#What tuning did alan wilson use for slide how to#

John Hammond asked Alan Wilson to teach the 63-year-old Son House how to play like Son House again. Son House is said to have tutored Robert Johnson. He not only retired but was an alcoholic and had not played guitar in years and could not remember his old songs and slide parts from the 20s and 30s. who was was better known as “Son House,” the great blues artist who had retired. He was a big fan of Eddie James House, Jr. John Lee Hooker said that Wilson was “the greatest harmonica player who ever lived.”

Alan Wilson was a superb slide guitar and harmonica player. He would sleep outside often to be alone with nature. Alan was a serious environmentalist trying to save the Redwood trees. He was very intelligent, awkward, suffered from depression and was not a prototypical rock star. His unusual voice came from him trying to mimic the voice of old blues singers. They were both written by him and based off old blues songs. Alan wasn’t the lead singer of Canned Heat but he sang the two best-known singles by them. They had two hit singles both sung by Alan Wilson, Going Up Country (1968 ) and On The Road Again (1969). Their appearance at Woodstock raised their stock higher. They followed that album with “Living the Blues”(#18) and in 1969 released album Hallelujah(#37). In 1968 they released “Boogie with Canned Heat” which made it to number 16. They made a self-titled album that year and it peaked at #76 on the Billboard Charts. In 1967, after appearing at the Monterey Pop Festival, Canned Heat signed to Liberty Records. He had a massive collection of old blues records and was a walking encyclopedia of the blues. Wilson’s nickname, “Blind Owl,” was bestowed upon him by friend John Fahey during a road trip in 1965 from Boston to Los Angeles and was a reference to the extra-thick lenses Wilson wore.Īlan moved to Los Angeles and met Bob “The Bear” Hite and in 1965 started Canned Heat. The group decided to take their name from “Canned Heat Blues,” an obscure 1928 track by bluesman Tommy Johnson that described the drug high achieved through drinking the household product Sterno. He was a frequent player at the Cambridge coffeehouse folk-blues circuit. Jimi Hendrix would die in a couple of weeks and Janis Joplin would follow a month later…all of them were age 27.Īlan grew up in Boston, Massachusetts where he became a music major at Boston University. He died in 1970 under strange circumstances outdoors in a sleeping bag near his band’s lead singer’s (Bob Hite) house. The best way to emulate his sound when not using a thumb pick is to employ hybrid picking, using a both a flatpick and the bare fingers to pick the strings, either together or in opposition.Alan Wilson is a forgotten figure who was a gifted musician.

Learning the various different methods to tune for slide guitar will give you more options to let you suit the tunings to your playing style.Īlso to know is, how do you play like Johnny Winter? Johnny always played with a thumb pick, which is very uncommon for the great majority of blues and blues-rock players. Slide guitar can be played in standard or open tunings, and each has its advantages and disadvantages. > Click to read more << Correspondingly, can you play slide guitar in standard tuning? Allman and Trucks, widely considered to be two of the greatest slide players ever, have mostly preferred to play slide in open E tuning, which is spelled, low to high, E B E G# B E. The most common open tunings for slide guitar playing are open E, D, G and A.