How did you decide?

[Dave Campbell]

well…

my first guitar was a stage one. i like vintagey type stuff, but never having sat behind a steel before, i wanted one that i knew was working. the vintage lover and lloyd green fan in me soon bought an ldg. a few years later i wanted to play some c6, and everyone is always going on and on about black push pulls, so…after the push pull came i never really played the ldg, so i sold it to buy an s10 push pull for a tour i was doing. i didn’t feel comfortable on the s10.

i’ve bought some other guitars when the opportunity came (not a ton of opportunities in my neck of the woods).

now i still have the emmons and just need another one so i can do some maintenance on mine…anybody got a lacquer emmons they want to part with?

[Bob Hoffnar]

Probably the most significant thing that influenced my pedalsteel buying was steel guitar shows. My first steel was a floor model MCI that I bought from Buddy Emmons while he was manning the booth in St Louis.
I only had $1000 and in the words of Buddy when I asked him why I should buy it” Well, it’s a pedalsteel and it works and it costs $1000”.

After that I went through all sorts of stuff but after hearing every brand played by the best players alive some guitars stood out. First Franklin steels and then Emmons.

I got to play the Clinesmith prototype at the Texas show and bought it because it blew my mind even though I didn’t have any use for it at the time and was pretty much dead broke.

[Brett Day]

For me, it was I wondered which brand I wanted to start out on. I'd been a keyboard player for five years, and didn't know much about steel brands, but in 1998, I got invited to go to the Smoky Mountain Steel Guitar Jamboree in Knoxville, Tennessee, which was hosted by steel guitarist Stoney Stonecipher, and at the time, I was just getting interested in playing steel. So, a friend of mine at the church I was a member of at the time said Stoney was a distant relative of his, and gave me the brochure, and I discovered all different steel brands-Emmons, Franklin, ZumSteel, GFI, and others. I recognized ZumSteel because it was the brand steel guitarist Myron Smith played at the Carolina Opry when I was eight. After watching and listening to Stoney play his Emmons, he told me to rent a steel, so I found one at a music store in Mauldin, SC and played with it, using picks and pedals, and loved it-it was a Sierra Artist S-10. Then, I got really serious about playing steel, and found Steel Guitar Nashville's website, and visited the store in 1999, where I noticed a 1974 Emmons GS-10. I got the steel for Christmas in 1999 and played it until 2004. In '04, I thought about an Emmons Legrande or a Sho-Bud Super Pro, but Bobbe Seymour told me he recommended GFI guitars, so I had my doubts about the GFI a little bit because I thought they looked smaller than other guitars at the time, but I got the GFI and it was pretty awesome, but in 2010, I remembered how I love Sho-Bud guitars and decided I wanted to play a Jackson Steel, so I got my Jackson Blackjack Custom in 2010, and it's a wonderful pedal steel!