OK......he's a great player (was)...but you guys still produce great players....Leo Kottke, Sonny Landreth....Buddy Miller...

Merry Xmas and New Year, by the way.....
Carl

Near the end of that long jam in Whipping Post from the Filmore E?

Yes, we still produce great players, but my personal fixation is with Duane. ;)

I'm trying to figure out what he's playing here. He's doing some sort of special effect. That's a good guess, Carl in Atlanta. If it was way high up, I'd guess he was making it tweet like a bird. Down low like that, I have no idea.

It looks to me like he's got a doobie caught between the strings.

Heh. I'd counted his fingers and knew there was something extra in there, but didn't know what it was. A joint wouldn't make a particularly interesting sound when drawn across guitar strings, though, so I don't think that's what it is.
It's the wrong angle for his Coricidin bottle. What is that thing?

This whole pic is a mystery.

"Down there"? If you're talking about which end of the neck his hands are at, that's "up", not "down". The shorter a ringing segment of string is, the higher the pitch will be (try it with a stretched rubber band; hold it down against a table at different points, and "twang" it).

The part of the string that matters is the part under which the pickups are located (the pickups are the two rectangular silvery things with pale yellowy borders, located under the strings on the body (the big roundish part) of the guitar; the pickups are electromagnetic widgets which convert the vibration of the strings into an electrical signal that gets passed to the amplifier.) And that part is made shorter by pressing the string against a fret that's way, way UP the fretboard where Duane's left hand is located.

Okay, it's "up" -- but what's he doing up there anyway?

It looks like he might be scraping the edge of the pick along a "wrapped" string, which would be one of the lowest three strings ("lower" strings are farther from the floor: They're bigger around, hence lower pitch at any given tension, at any given fret) unless Duane used heavier strings with a wrapped "G", which wouldn't be at all inconsistent with his playing -- nor with where his fingers appear to be in the photo. If it's not a wrapped "G", it looks like it's the "D".

(You could scrape the edge of the pick along an un-wrapped string, too, but since those strings are smooth, it wouldn't make any noise, so why bother?)

Of course, it does matter WHERE on the string you hit it with the pick; towards the middle of the "free span", you get a "mellower" sound: So it's conceivable that he might be picking normally rather than scraping, but just doing it in an odd place. The trouble with that theory is that a) his right hand is at a very wrong angle for doing that, and b) that's not just an odd place to be picking, it's a really DAMNED odd place. Objection a) might be answered by the possibility that he's picking with the edge rather than the flat of the pick: The angle of the pick against the string affects the sound. But an angle as extreme as that is on the weak end of "plausible".

He might be dinging the string against the fretboard with the edge of the pick, which (though I hate to admit it) is moderately similar to the horrible "double tapping" craze initiated by Eddie Van Halen some years later.

All of us here are very interested in what Duane was doing, so if you are able to shed some light, we'll appreciate it.
This is a summation of Duane's technique, and the types of guitars and amps he used.
He was a circular picker and never used a pick when he was playing slide. He did on occasion wrap his Coricidin bottle in gauze. I think that's how he has it here.

Here's an excerpt on his technique:

Duane's tone on the slide is unique due to a number of points that set him apart from his other contemporaries. Firstly, he played with a glass Coricidin Medicine Bottle. This is not actually long enough to cover the whole neck of a Les Paul, so he never played full chords with it, preferring never to reach beyond triads (3 string chords).

It also means that he had to position the slide differently as he moved across the neck. He held the slide in such a way that the inside rim of the bottle rested on the second knuckle of his ring finger, and he used the tip of that finger to position the slide over the frets. In order to keep the slide at the correct angle, he held the guitar high, and angled it up slightly higher than most guitarists do. He also put his middle finger across the strings behind the slide in order to mute the other strings and prevent unwanted overtones. This is difficult to do properly unless the action is set rather high, implying that Duane liked his guitars set up that way. His slides around the strings while playing normal fretted work also tend to imply that his guitars were set up with fairly low frets.

As far as Duane's fretted technique goes, he also had a number of idiosyncrasies that made his playing all the more unique. Firstly, he used a technique called circular picking, whereby the pick doesn't move simply perpendicular to the strings, but in a circular motion. Not only does this soften the attack, but it allows you to jump strings in a far more even, controlled manner. As he held his pick between his thumb and forefinger, he kept the other three fingers on his right hand virtually still, making his right hand seem almost motionless as his fingers moved the pick as opposed to his whole hand. This can be seen quite clearly on the Fillmore Video.

Also, Duane was in fact left-handed, despite playing the guitar as if right handed. This added strength in his fretting hand gave him a greater degree of control when bending notes or adding vibrato, plus it meant that his picking hand was not quite as strong, seeming to give him a very light touch. Listen to the version of Dreams from the debut album for an example of his extraordinary control over slow bends and slow vibrato. This also gave him added strength and dexterity with his pinky on his fretting hand.

Duane always used a pick when playing lead work, but also never played slide with a pick. Instead, he used his thumb, index and middle fingers to pluck the strings. He backed off the tone a little to prevent squeals from being audible, and he used a variety of pickup positions, depending on how high he intended to play. When his notes extended past the fretboard, as in "Layla", "Mountain Jam" and "Don't Keep Me Wonderin'" and others, he would use the Bridge/Treble Pickup (although with the tone backed off considerably). On most others, he used the Neck/Rhythm pickup, or both.

When playing fretted lead for extended solos, he used both pickups, and manipulated the tone controls extensively. The solos in "Whipping Post" and "In Memory Of Elizabeth Reed" from the "At Fillmore East" Album are good examples of this. Note also that he would often end the solo for Whipping Post by getting gradually quieter - this let him reset the volume controls gradually lower to the required rhythm volume for the next verse - this was necessary since he had used both pickups at full wack.

In other songs with shorter solos, such as the first section of "You Don't Love Me" and "Hot 'Lanta", he would set one pickup to be quiet for rhythm work, and the other to be loud for solo work, and he could use the pickup selector as a sort of channel selector.

One of the most important parts of Duane's slide sound is his use of alternative open tunings. Of the tunes he recorded with the Allman Brothers Band with slide features in them, the tunings were grouped thus:

Open E - Statesboro' Blues, Done Somebody Wrong, One Way Out, Trouble No More (Live), Drunken Hearted Boy, Stand Back, Don't Keep Me Wonderin', and Little Martha.

Standard Tuning - Dreams, Mountain Jam, Midnight Rider, and Trouble No More (debut album version).

he is just doulble tapping

He is tapping. He used this technique at the end of his solo on Elizabeth Reed from the Fillmore album. He also used it for some of his Stormy Monday solos, and my guess is that this was Stormy Monday. Liz Reed is done higher on the neck than this. This is just right for Stormy. Listen to New Orleans 9/16/71--he does it there and, in this photo, it's the right guitar for that time period.

Thanks, Charlie!
I'm always impressed by how knowledgeable Duane fans are.

No problem. Duane inspired a fanatical following. I love the Wednesday Duane pics!!