The Steel Guitar Forum

Danny James' steel ... as played by Bobby Ingano






Danny and his lovely wife watch as Bobby takes his changer thru its paces ...

That's a nice looking rig. I'll have to ask Bobby about it. He has a house full of guitars, but it's hard to get him to use anything but a Ric on jobs.

Here's one of my "pedalap steels", this one's been on this forum a time or two..............


Here's another pic with the levers folded back:

Jim, that does look sweet, what with the new finish now.

There certainly are a lot of nice guitars and beautiful workmanship represented here. This thread was a great idea.

My thanks to Rick Aiello for posting the pictures of my guitar for me with Bobby Ingano trying it out a couple of years ago at the City Folks Festival in Dayton Ohio.

At that time I found I needed to do a little more work to perfect my tuning changer. It works good and holds tune very nicely now. You will notice a Rick Aiello MRI pickup on it as well.

Yes Bill Creller is right, I know Bobby Ingano likes to play his Ric's. What a wonderful musician he is.

Mike McBride wrote:Beautiful..

Let's see some crude ones too!

Is this crude enough?

Cool ax Mark! What is the story behind this guitar?

I would like to make one out a hand hewn timber from my Dad's old barn but he tore the thing down & used it for firewood. AArgh.

I thought you might like that one

That gem was on ebay a while back and when I saw it I had to save the picture since it was THE most crude guitar I've ever seen. Don't remember anything else about it unfortunately.

Some day when I have the time I'd like to construct a crude lap steel using tear-off parts that I know I will never use on anything else... just for fun.

This is turning out to be a great thread, and lots of interesting ideas are coming to the surface.

I particularly liked George's toilet seat. I've seen a banjo made in a similar way.

I've thought of putting a clock into a banjo pot.

Another interesting idea would be to insert a CD drive, and a switch so that you could change the output from the pickup to the CD. Then you could shove a CD in and "mime" to the music.

Alan B.

If you had said you broke your wrist making one of those fine steels I'd say it was almost worth it.

Wow, you really suffer from "sidewaysia" (the inability to play a guitar in the conventional vertical manner)

Nice stuff.

This one was the prototype for the double neck console, posted earlier:



It was made to bolt onto the side of Guitarzilla.
This is Junior Blue, a 6-string bass with pickups on both ends of the neck:



And for something different:

Oh-oh. I think we just veered off the highway...

Jim Pitman wrote:...Wow, you really suffer from "sidewaysia" (the inability to play a guitar in the conventional vertical manner)...

I guess all steel guitarists do. But I only included photos of those types of instruments played with a bar in this thread. That's just the tip of the iceberg; I've also built citterns, mediaeval guitars, banjos, solid electric guitars, etc.

I don't generally waste time building instruments I can go out and buy. For instance, I have eight 12-string guitars, seven mandolines, etc.

George Piburn wrote:Alan Brookes said in a forum thread that one could use a 2x4 and toilet seat for a lap steel. I took him up on the idea....

Well here's another idea. You've seen those old ironing boards that used to hinge down from the wall and retract when out of use ? What about a steel guitar that does the same thing. Taking it one step further you could install one in the toilet, so that you could practise playing steel instead of reading a magazine....

While I am impressed by the artistic offerings, I especially enjoy off-the-wall designs.

I once heard that it is the skill of the craftsman, not his tools, that produces art.

Maybe this is true of lap steel music also.

I didn't make this, its on craigs list in Madison $50.

Where there's a will..........................

http://madison.craigslist.org/msg/652188650.html

This is a great thread!! Alan has made so many instruments that he blows us all away!

These are all great. Chas- How did the one with the pickups on both ends work? Can you bolt or slide these onto another steel?

I like the idea of a triple or duel that snaps together so you can easly take apart if needed and only take one (or two)sections.

Rick A and Chris (seldomfed) show us your steels too.

Gary, the pickups on both ends of the neck, for me, goes back to the mid '80s when I began playing on film scores and I needed to be able to make unusual and complicated sounds. At the time, I was using my Super Pro, aka the no-Bud:

I could weave things like drill rods, springs and what-not in the strings and each pickup would "hear" something different.
Then around 1990 I made Guitarzilla, that had a short scale, a long scale and 5 string bass neck, each with pickups on both ends:

In the past decade, the weaving stuff got more complicated. Such as thin steel plates with 66 rods of inconel alloy that can be bowed or struck:

The beauty of pickups on both ends of a bass neck is, I can "roll" the bar on the "friendlier" frets, like the 5th, 7th and 12th and both sides of the bar are nicely in tune and it makes a very full sound. On frets like 4 and 9, because the frets are tempered, but harmonics are just, I have to "roll" a little flat (15 cents) to be in tune and get the same "effect".

I'm so impressed by all you talented, inspired folks.

It seem that there is a lot of builder talent here that we didn't know about!!

Building your own instrument gives great satisfaction.

It seem that there is a lot of builder talent here that we didn't know about!!

Building your own instrument gives great satisfaction.

Sorry about the double post....couldn't figure out how to delete it...

Rick A and Chris (seldomfed) show us your steels too.

These were made at my home ... so I guess they qualify for this thread ...

That's a whole lot of frying pans.

Has anyone thought of building a lap steel out of a real frying pan ?