I’ll admit that I’m a gearhead when it comes to guitars. I love noodling with new and interesting effects, amplifiers and the guitars themselves. However, I also consider myself to have reasonably good taste in guitar tone, and there are a lot of things that just done survive the honeymoon period because in the end - they don’t sound good.

Well, here’s a pleasant surprise that has survived the honeymoon period. It’s called the Jet Slide, and it’s a nifty little innovation that overcomes a lot of the problems that guitarists have faced when trying to incorporate slide guitar into their live playing.

See, the classic guitar slide is a cylinder of either glass, metal, bone or ceramic that slips over one of your fingers on your fretting hand. But that can present a real problem when you want to alternate between slide guitar and traditional guitar playing in a single song. Usually this means having the slide somewhere close to you as you play, and having to quickly grab the slide, put it on, play the slide part, take it off, put it down (or throw it down!), and get back to playing traditional guitar - all without missing too many beats (especially if you’re the only guitar player in the band). It’s nerve wracking, and very prone to mistakes. Who needs that?

Here’s what a traditional slide looks like while being played:

I’ll admit, I have seen a few pros who can somehow play traditional, fretted guitar while they still have one of those bulky cylinders on one of their fingers. Usually, they accomplish this by putting the slide on their pinky, and using the other 3 fingers to fret. I tried hard to figure out how to do that, but I just couldn’t make it happen with any effectiveness. I felt like I was giving up control of the slide having it on my pinky, and I still didn’t have full use of the other 3 fingers. That’s a no-win compromise.

The Jet Slide is an ingenious device that makes it easy to leave the slide on your hand while still being able to play fretted chords. I could try to explain it further, but you know what they say - a picture is worth a thousand words:

See how he’s able to fret some notes, and then flip his finger into position and have the Jet Slide pop into place, ready to play slide guitar? It really works. And it’s not hard to learn at all. No steep learning curve or anything - just do what comes naturally, and the slide pops into place.

The real secret is that little tab of metal sticking out from the slide. It’s hard to see in the animated picture, but these two pics make it very clear:

Your pinky naturally grabs on to the metal tab as you move your hand from a normal fretting position into a traditional slide guitar position. To get back to fretting, all you have to do is kinda pop your fingers away from the fretboard, and your pinky releases the metal tab, letting the Jet Slide fall away from your fingers (ready to be grabbed again).

Simple. Effective. And damned cheap.

That’s the way I wish all of my guitar toys were!