Slack key guitar is a style of playing acoustic six-string steel-string guitar with the fingers, developed in Hawaii and very much part of Hawaiian music, where it is confusingly also known as Hawaiian guitar (and this confusion being no fault of the Hawaiians, who presumably have the right to decide what a Hawaiian guitar is).

The term slack key comes from the Hawaiian language term for the style, ki ho`alu, which means slacking the keys, the term keys here meaning tuning pegs or machine heads rather than musical key signatures.

An enormous number of tunings are used, particularly open G tunings.

External links

• http://www.givemesomeslack.com/slackkey.html Mika'ele McCellan describes the basic tunings.
• http://www.dancingcat.com/skbook4a-tuningchart.php/ 62 tunings, 50 of them already used in recording and the other 12 used live
• http://www.taropatch.net/ A community of slack key players and enthusiasts