I want to buy a slider for my electric guitar. Does anyone know what type (material) Jonny uses ?

You mean slides right? I think he tends to use metal. I love his playing with a slide. He uses a volume pedal to cut off the transient of a note he's playing and let the sound kind of swell in. He makes some amazing atmospheres with his delays and swells.

Oh yeah, what I meant is a slide then. Thanks for your comment. So that means that a volume pedal is also an absolute must-have to try and replicate some of these atmospheric sounds ?

live yes. in a recording absolutely not. you could just chop it up and fade into each section or just make sure the initial transient when you pluck the string isn't kept. live would be very difficult to do without a volume pedal. unless you have an extra hand or something, then you could just use the volume knob on the guitar itself. Slides are not easy to use well. I know i can't. I'd have to put in a bunch of hours working on it. You fret the note on the fret bar itself, and palm mute all the strings you don't want to sound (which i find particularly difficult). If i'm ever trying to do a Johnny type sounding guitar, i don't bother with the slide. I just try to get a nice mixture of tone, reverb and of course delays. He must be putting delays on his delays sometimes. Love his stuff sound. To me it's a gigantic part of what makes coldplay sound like coldplay, all bendy and echo-y and melodic

Where do you get your delays from ? I don't seem to find a way of getting one with my tiny desktop amp.

I use almost all, actually completely all software digital delays. Even live I'll have a laptop for that kind of thing. Running Apple MainStage. It has more virtual pedals than I'd ever need. I like the plugin called Delay Designer that comes with logic and MainStage

Jonny has used both metal and glass slides at various times over the years. IIRC in the book his tech wrote a few years ago it was stated that he's not picky about a lot of that stuff. (slides, strings, capos etc.)

 

He seems to be using metal for the live Ghost Stories stuff though.

Oh man, nearly a year gone by and I still haven't bought a guitar slide... :(

Aw you should do it! Jonny uses a metal slide on AHFOD and Up&Up. The one big example I can think of where the glass slide is really important is on the live version of Spies. Before getting a slide, a bandmate and I used a shot glass as a slide and it works great! Been using a Pyrex slide ever since. Metal is nice and brassy though. My advice is to get one a metal one first and maybe a glass or pyrex one later (pyrex is very resistant to breaking). It's easy to improvise with any glass item. :D

 

Regarding volume pedals, you can do soundswells on guitars by 1. starting with volume off, 2. plucking note(s), 3. using your hand or just your pinkie to turn the volume up. This is especially easy on Stratocaster-style guitars. A volume pedal frees up your hands to do what they want though - and it's what gets utilized for the very ambient slidy bits on Up&Up.

Thanks for your comment ! Yeah, I noticed that recently he has been using more metal slides. I checked out some live videos from the Parachutes and AROBTTH eras and there it seemed to be more glass, so I am a bit inclined towards glass (since those are the soundscapes I am looking to replicate, at least as much as my limited playing abilities will allow me to).