Playing Spanish and steel

[ryome]

How many of you steel players also play Spanish style? For those that do both, can you discuss the thought process that is involved when making the change or how your approach may vary from one to the other. This is an important subject for my thesis research. Thanks for you input.
Ryan

[Roy Thomson]

Although steel is my speciality I also play
some classical and fingerstyle guitar.

I first learned to read music on classical
guitar. Any material that I thought might
sound good on steel I transcribe to E9th,
C6th etc. You must know your fretboards and how to find the chords, notes. Time consuming at first but has been well worth the effort for me.

As a for instance, I have always wanted to play fingerstyle on steel. To my knowledge there are no such courses out there so I learned fingerstyle arrangements from Chet Atkins music on standard guitar and then transcribed to steel. Some tunes can be done on E9th as well as C6th and an E Diatonic tuning which I use.

Recently I have changed my C6th neck tuning to E6th (2 full steps higher). This makes my 9th and 10th strings "A" and "E" respectively
which is the same as standard guitar. I find it is now easier to transcribe music to my steel with this change.

I do not sight read music and for my purposes it is really not necessary. Working with several different tunings would make it very difficult to do so.

"Slow" gets me there.

Roy Thomson

[Larry Kunkel]

I recently started playing lap steel after playing regular guitar for 40+years. I found many songs that I played on regular guitar were as easy or easier to play on lap steel. Here are a few of them... Satin Doll, Canadian Sunset, Yellowbird, Hot Toddy, Temptation, Indian Love Call, Danny Boy,Somewhere Over the Rainbow etc.. I'm still discovering new ones. (C13th is the only tuning I've explored much...I am starting on E6th)


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