Slight Slide History & Why Our Slides Are So Different

These slides are designed to be lighter, faster and more intuitive on the hand and offer a wider tonal pallet so you can get “more with less.” I’ve been creating these slides for over 15 years now and love to bring artists, customers and retailers together with our unique family of tone tools. We have created slides that enable the player to expand his or her tonal pallet (color, sustain, and presence), making it a more personal journey, a more Custom Slide, and enabling them to better express the tones in their heads and hearts!!

What I’ve designed are tone and style specific tools to the various needs of the slide players out there looking for more from their slides than a piece of pipe or Pyrex!!

In the beginning, it was primarily a case of “re-purposing” rather than invention…you had a wine or whiskey bottle or a jack knife…an old ham bone or a Coricidin bottle after taking all the pills, and you end up with a slide. It’s great if that is all you have, but…

When companies started making slides, they rarely created innovation…they just copied what was there before.

This has carried over for years and created a real lack of advancement in slide design. And to make things worse, they started making slides with cheaper materials to cut their costs at the expense of the slide players!!

What we have done is create innovative tone tools with advanced ergonomic features…

• The slides’ shafts have a slight curve on one side, to emulate the fingerboard radius of the neck you are playing on. To either side of the “curve,” it straightens out so that you can adjust the playing surface by slightly turning the slide with your thumb…easy and effective.
• The slides’ inner diameters are slightly oval in shape, to better reflect the real shape of the human finger. The oval shape also enables the slide to be slightly locked on the finger better, by turning it against the oval of your finger, unlike a round slide that is the same all round, with no shape tension or locking possibilities.
• Each slide is hand tapered at each end and the inside of the slides are ribbed for a more secure fit and more control. By rounding the ends by hand and placing slight ribbing to the inside of the slides, this adds another level of stability and control to the slides!! Again, it’s thinking about how the finger interacts with the tone-tool!!
• These are made from a solid block of Stoneware clay (denser than most clay), as opposed to most of the other “Ceramic” slides like Mudslide or Moonshine that are created from molds and a liquid clay called “slip.”
• We take these dense stoneware “clay core” slides and wrap one of our “custom” glazes, created in house, around them; each one is hand dipped. The glazes contain various rare earth elements (microcrystalline deposits) and metals as well (iron or cobalt for example) and these various elements coming together of these elements is what creates these wonderful worlds of tonal possibilities for the questing slide player.
• Each model has its own character and tonal pallet, enabling you to search out a wonderful “sonic paintbrush” for any project.
• We create these in smaller batches so that greater attention to detail is given to each slide, helping to create a handcrafted, artisan product…made right here in the good old USA!!!

For many companies, slides are a part of what they do, and most times these companies aren’t the ones that create the slides themselves but “farm out” the products from other sources, and even to other countries!!

At Rocky Mountain Slides, guitar slides are ALL WE DO and have been creating these unique tone toys since 2002, OVER 11 YEARS OF COMMITMENT to all those sliders out there, looking for tone tools that help get them to where they want to be. Truly, by being able to offer our various models and the literally “thousands of possibilities” that these slides come in….we are offering ARTISAN GUITAR SLIDES WITH ALTITUDE!!!