The focus in this Johnny Winter guitar lesson is on slide guitar! And to begin our guitars have to be in open D tuning. But before that we get shown some nice Johnny footage and then a recap of it rinse, lather, repeat a few times.
There are 3 different ways to start this Texas Hurricane Digital guitar presentation. Hitting the 'play all' button gets you the Intro footage which ultimately deposits you at the other 2 menus. The Johnny menu and the Al Eck menu.
Mirror image menus where in Johnny plays it and Al breaks it down. Its all electric guitar slide work in open D and later G. You only find out its in open D when you go to the Al Eck menu which I think they should have clued us to earlier. Johnny Winter is playing a Gibson Fire bird sitting down and Al Eck is playing a Gibson Les Paul.
Anyway you can see that Johnny is in declining in health but his guitar playing hasn't suffered. Johnny uses a thumb pick on his right hand and wears his chrome slide on his left little finger. When I say its mostly slide there is serious delta blues picking going on in spots too.
When we head over to the Al Eck menu the first thing Al does is tune us to D A F# D A D or open D. Then immediately we see footage of Johnny playing a lick and then move back to Al explaining how its done with the slide mostly on the two highest strings.
Its a bit involved so you need to get the lick well into your mind. Then we do it again but with triplets at the high E and B strings a la Elmore James. Al Eck has his own unique delivery and is quite good at his craft. Also interspersing lots of short Johnny segments with each lick which keeps the sound alive in your mind. I just tuned my guitar to open D and it appears really guitar friendly.
“I never practice my guitar… from time to time I just open the case and throw in a piece of raw meat.”
― Wes Montgomery