Reading Music

John Bumbarger · Post by **John Bumbarger** » 16 Dec 2020 4:51 pm

I can read music. Is there any way to transfer that to steel guitar by looking at sheet music. I'm trying to figure that out. Maybe I'm thick.

Bill McCloskey · Post by **Bill McCloskey** » 16 Dec 2020 7:18 pm

The short answer is yes. I do it all the time, in fact, since I play nothing but standards, that is how I learn new tunes.

The long answer is: need more info. Are you playing straight steel or pedal? What tuning are you playing?

I play a 10 string lap steel tuning called the Eharp tuning and I have hundreds of pages of original lessons that start you out from the beginning playing from sheet music.

Pedal steel is more complicated because of the various knee levers and pedals.

Not sure that For sale: music is the right place for this topic however.

John Bumbarger · Post by **John Bumbarger** » 17 Dec 2020 3:57 am

I play pedal steel guitar E9th Standard set-up 3 floors pedals and 4 knee levers. If I can get the basics I probably can figure it with the pedals.

Jeremy Reeves · Post by **Jeremy Reeves** » 17 Dec 2020 5:17 am

I think the trick to reading standard notation is to analyze as you play. You don't just read the notes, you read the scale degrees/chord tones. So if you're in the key of G major and you see an F#, you know that's the 7th scale degree or the 3rd of the V chord. When you learn chords on the pedal steel analyze the notes to see what part of the chord they are.

John Bumbarger · Post by **John Bumbarger** » 17 Dec 2020 7:13 am

Does anyone know of some written material on reading notes and converting to steel guitar?

Bill McCloskey · Post by **Bill McCloskey** » 17 Dec 2020 8:28 am

1. Spreadsheet your neck.

2. Spreadsheet each chord tone on the neck for each chord in the song.

3. Find the melody notes on the same fret as your chord tones.

4. Play the song.

Example: Here is a G6th chord on my tuning.

John Bumbarger · Post by **John Bumbarger** » 17 Dec 2020 11:13 am

Thanks

Gene Tani · Post by **Gene Tani** » 19 Dec 2020 9:13 am

There's lots of exercises to do on 6 string which you can do on e9 neck as well, learning triads/dom7s, pentatonic scales in the most common keys (or top of circle of 5ths) and build off that

https://old.reddit.com/r/jazzguitar/com ... s/gf2nwa0/

http://www.fretjam.com/guitar-fretboard-lessons.html

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there's also books in tab and treble clef for the front neck, I like this one as a warmup also

https://www.amazon.com/100-Licks-Pedal- ... 1458497291

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finally there's maybe somewhere on the web, scale degree charts like in Joe Wright's book (which has a LOT of them), something like https://bb.steelguitarforum.com/viewtop ... 30#2017830