For the "Wilde Slide" tuning I wanted to keep the auxiliary enharmonics in the spirit of the original Wilde Tuning, being a second position major/minor pentatonic deep bending monster; flexibility in other positions is compromised in order to make 2nd position as powerful as possible for-blues and rock style playing.
So I spent a couple hours and quite a bit of blu-tak (and a slight bit of engraver work) to convert slide-out to a Wilde Tuning in A, and then with the slide-in, I figured maybe it should drop the draw note to the next lowest minor pentatonic note, and have it be able to bend all the way down to the next lowest minor pentatonic note after that.
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On the surface you might think that this tuning looks insane.
Immediately you need to forget the idea tha the slider will raise or lower a note by a semitone or even by a consistent number of semitones.
It makes more sense if you focus on what each of the slide-in draw notes are, and what they bend down to.
Remember these are meant to be auxiliary enharmonics to the main slide-out tuning.
The idea is that you would do most of your playing with the slide out; it functions as a standard Wilde Tuned diatonic, but you can slide in to get effects and other sounds that would normally be missing.
What do I get?
WIth the slide in I can bend from any minor pentatonic note up or down to the next note, with the exception of the 5 to th flat 7, I get flat 6 to flat 7 instead.
Also with the slide in I get the flat 7 as a natural draw note in every octave, I get the flat 3, and the 4 as natural draw notes in every octave as well.
I can bend the flat 3 up to the 4 or all the way down to the root. I can bend the 4 all the way up to the 5, the flat 6 to the flat 7 and the flat 7 up to the root).
Some happy accidents are that now the flat 6 is available as a bottom bend, and the major 7 and major 2 are available as natural blow notes.
Another happy accident is that a lot of my all-draw Wilde-tuning licks work the same with the slide in, but give a different sound because they are hitting different scale degrees and bends. Its cool!
Having a slide is another thing I have to get used to working into my playing, but I have a feeling that once I get used to it, its going to be a lot of fun for tracking stuff like Angus Young or Slash guitar solos.
What else?
I imagine the same thing can be done for any tuning. Or even with the same tuning but choosing different types of auxiliary enharmonics for different styles of music: emphasizing chords, flexibility of different posiitions, switching between major and minor versions of the same tuning, etc.
I played with another version of holes 3 and 7 where the natural draw was an A instead of a Bb, this basically gave me a built in "Easy Third" as well by just going slide-in for holes 2, 3 and 6, 7. But in 2nd position it caused me some awkward moments where I would hit a major 2nd or major 3rd over a minor chord, so I changed it to a Bb.
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