How to get the instance of a ion-slides

Per the Ionic documentation, you can do this using @ViewChild:

import { Component, ViewChild } from '@angular/core';
import { Slides } from 'ionic-angular';
...

@Component({
  ...
})
class MyPage {
  @ViewChild('loopSlider') sliderComponent: Slides;

  ...
}

Now that Ionic4 has been out for a while it's probably frugal to update answers like this, for it.

import { IonSlides } from '@ionic/angular';

export class...
@ViewChild(IonSlides) productSlider: IonSlides;