Hiya Jen, I don't know if'n yood call me asstoot er not,but...... a slide is used mostly in blues songs,those long sustained notes,...those are made by usin' a slide. using a slide with open tuning is really easy, although it does take some practice.the fret bars are your chords,if you're tuned to open D, your first fret bar would be an D sharp, followed by A,and so on, if you email me I can send you a link that will explain it better than I am able to. Now there are some folks, Dickie Betts, Eric Clapton ,Stevie Ray Vaughan, to name a few that can use standard tuning make bar chords an slide all at the same time,personally I think you may have to be born with a coupe o' extra fingers to accomplish this, or at least be a hell of a better guitar player than I'll ever be.but I hope this helped you and if you'd like to find out more about slide I've got a couple of really good links that I could email you, if I knew how they put links on threads I'd do that for ya but the concept some how evades me. peace-Biskit-