One pedal and four strings

[Andrew Goulet]

If you had a pedal steel with four strings and one pedal, what copedent would you use?

[Doug Beaumier]

I'd probably go with the setup below. The pedal would give you a IV chord and a IIm chord, also a IIm7. Regardless of what setup you choose, you'd be missing out on a whole lot.

[tab]open pedal

B C#
G# A
F#
E
[/tab]

[Fred Treece]

G
E
C—->C#
A

Nice wide string spacing for slants, and I’d have Charlie make me a Slide Pro capo for it too.

[Ian Rae]

What prompted the question? Not a real guitar? So what then?

[Andrew Goulet]

That's a sensible solution Doug!

Simple and cool Fred!

Ian, just a little challenge I thought of today at rehearsal. I guess theorycrafting simple guitars has been in my mind from reading Jimmie Hudson's earlier thread.

It does raise some interesting questions. Do you get a triad? Go with harmonized pairs? How many chords or useable fragments could you get?

[Ian Rae]

Now I see. Jimmy's idea of an expandable instrument is a good one. Just as we gradually learn what the changes do on a full-blown 3x5, we could instead physically add them as required. I would start with A&B and the old-fashioned lever that lowers 2 and 8.

[Andrew Goulet]

I was more thinking what if you had just one pedal, and four strings total. So you could pick A or B or a lever but not all (unless your one pedal made all those changes).

[Andrew Frost]

Ab
F > E
D
Bb > B

Maybe not in real life though. Interesting thought experiment. If you had one shoe, where would you step?

[Ian Rae]

The very first pedal was to give a quick change from an E tuning to an A to save switching necks. So I would raise G# and B to A and C#. That's what Bud Isaacs did. Emmons and Day later split it up and the rest is history.

[Bill Miller]

Or perhaps one string and four pedals....

[Andrew Frost]

Bill Miller
PostPosted: 11 Jul 2021 7:12pm Post subject:
Or perhaps one string and four pedals....

One string eh?
Tuned pure or straight-up? 😅

[Ian Rae]

For a while I did own a guitar with four strings, one pedal and one lever.

This was while I was building my first 12-string universal. I figured that strings 5-8 were the heart of the instrument in both tunings, and I needed to test the designs of the pedal and lever mechanisms.

This included hooking them both to string 5 to test the split function. A test bed, though, not a working instrument.

[Andrew Goulet]

How about...

C---->B
Ab--->A
F---->F#
D---->E