Slide guitar comes in two varieties:

• Bottleneck guitar is played in a conventional manner, just with a bottleneck on one finger of your fretboard hand, and may be played on a normally set up guitar. Open tunings are most often used. Dobros and other resonator guitars are popular... but they must be the round-neck variety, square necks are strictly for steel guitar.

• Steel guitar is played with the guitar across your lap or in front of you, either on a table or on its own built-in legs. So your "fretboard" hand reaches over the neck rather than under it, and you don't actually use the fretboard at all, just the steel which gives steel guitar its name.

So the instruments used tend to be as different as the playing positions. A conventional guitar can be used to play either style, but for steel guitar more often a raised action is used which makes the frets doubly unreachable even if you wanted to, or a custom-built steel guitar which may not have frets at all, just markers. And a steel guitar player doesn't need to get their hand around the neck, so the neck can be a lot stronger and/or built in to the body.

Pedal steel guitars don't seem to have necks at all, they're all body, but they're still spoken of as having a neck, in fact the most common professional instrument is called a D10 and has twenty strings, arranged in two necks only one of which is ever played at a time. Three and even four neck steel guitars also exist!

Caution

Many steel guitar tunings use string gauges and tensions that would break a conventional guitar!

Tunings

See bottleneck guitar and steel guitar for tunings.