One of the toughest parts of playing slide guitar is getting the slide on the strings, muting the strings behind the slide and not having the strings touch the frets.  It’s critical to get this right to have the note ring out and slide from tone to tone.

Raising your action on your guitar is a good technique to help make this easier.  But raising the action is easier said than done.  It can require you taking your guitar into the shop and it also means that playing regular style is a lot harder on that guitar.  It’s almost like you need one guitar just to play slide only.

Solution: The Nut Extender.  The extension nut goes on top of your regular nut and raises the action of your guitar to a point where it’s too high to fret and perfect for slide playing.

Here’s a video of guitar set up with a extension nut:

Also check out an earlier post on slide playing.