The Steel Guitar Forum

My tone on this recording isn't as bright as the track James referenced, but it shows how much difference the choice of a glass bar can make. It was played on the C6th neck of my Williams D-12.

http://openhearts.b0b.com:16080/oh3/bonus.html

b0b wrote:My tone on this recording isn't as bright as the track James referenced, but it shows how much difference the choice of a glass bar can make. It was played on the C6th neck of my Williams D-12.

http://openhearts.b0b.com:16080/oh3/bonus.html

I like the steel tone on this one. It's closer than I expected to the Mazzy clip. I have a boyett glass bar but stopped using it because it has too many rough spots on the surface.

Honestly, Bob, your singer is not in your league. I mean that as a compliment to you.

James, ignore the PSG nazis and play what you want! Simple is a great approach and can be very difficult to appropriately execute. I'm sure you know that music is NOT about chops, so you're obviously one up there!

The clip sounds to me like a strat on the front pickup played with a thin glass slide, like a dunlop pyrex slide. If you want to cop that tone, your best bet is to try a pyrex slide on your lap steel - if possible one with a single coil pickup in the "front" position.

I LOVE that tone myself, but I'm convinced the only way to really get it on a lap steel is to have a custom built steel made that is like a strat: 6 strings, 3 pups, ash/alder body, maple bolt on neck, strat bridge. Or just get a square neck fitted to a strat body

James: That track didn't make the cut for the CD because John didn't like his vocal. I'm not playing with that band anymore, but I do still like their music.

I could have EQ'd the steel for a thinner tone, more like the Mazzy clip, if that was what I wanted. I opted for a darker tone because it sounded better in the context of the trio.

michael...i can't imagine your interest in steel, really since you find emmons, franklin and hughey 'thin and wimpy'..without creativity...much nashville recording by them in the last 35 years..

b0b wrote:I don't know, Michael. I had breakfast in a restaurant yesterday and heard a bit of Top 40 "Country" radio there. I was surprised by how much pedal steel there was, and how good the steel playing was. I don't like that kind of music much (maybe I'm just too old), but I wouldn't write the pedal steel off just yet.

b0b, I agree that there's quite a bit of steel in today's Nashville "country". I've often meant to post that in all the threads complaining that modern country "doesn't use steel". The few times I've (almost always unwillingly) been exposed to "country" radio, it has seemed to me the majority of songs DO have steel on them. However, while the playing is smooth, and the steel parts are generally fairly simple (not in itself a negative, to me, at all), what gets me is that the steel playing is numbingly generic (like the music overall). The same stock licks over and over. I'm sure that can't be blamed on the players--anybody good enough to work regularly in the studios surely can, and would rather, be more creative, but you gotta do what the producer wants.

this thread is really about individual taste in music, there really is no point trying to win people's taste over to your own.

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michael...i think you missed my point...you said not much in the last 35 years out of nashville that wasn't thin, wimpy and non-creative. have you heard anything john h. played with vince..have you heard any emmons/pennington swingin' stuff...emmons minors aloud or one for the road...paul franklin and mike johnson's incredible fill and backup on numerous artists...and hundreds of other examples by numerous players. i think you may be denying yourself by your narrow outlook.

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i still think you missed my point...

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I forget the guy the quote is credited to but he said "99 percent of everything is junk". That's how I see radio...how many hours do I want to listen to bad music, commercials, and DJ jibber-jabber in the hopes of hearing one new thing I may like enough to buy? I have friends who will tell me about the good stuff.

I also came up listening to the same kind of stuff you did, and I agree completely with this. But I also say that the kind of country music I like is not going anywhere. It's just subterranean in the commercial music world. It may come back up some, or may not, but it ain't going anywhere. IMHO, classic country pedal steel is not a dinosaur, and I think the great country pedal steel players have strongly influenced steel players moving into many other styles.

Frankly, when you get right down to it, everything I listen to is completely subterranean in the commercial music world - blues, jazz, country, soul, R&B, Americana, or roots-music of any kind. None of it is going the way of the dinosaur, but it may never be "flavor of the month" again. That's fine with me.

I still don't see why one needs a pedal steel to play the kind of stuff linked in the original post. Emphatically - play whatever you want on whatever instrument you want. I started playing pedal steel strictly to add textures myself, but as I started to discover what was possible in the hands of someone who could really play it, it got way out of hand.

Seriously - if I could get what I needed out of a 6-string guitar or lap steel, I would never drag around this contraption that, until I figured out how to deal with it, gave me a hernia and back issues, takes up lots of my musical time re-learning how to deal with musical issues I could deal with on guitar 30 years earlier, cuts down on the time I have to play guitar, forces me to drag interminable amounts of equipment to rehearsals and gigs, separates me with beaucoups bucks, makes it very hard to front a band, and in general is a complete PITA. But I (and many others) love PSG and play it in spite of these issues.

Dave Mudgett wrote:I still don't see why one needs a pedal steel to play the kind of stuff linked in the original post. Emphatically - play whatever you want on whatever instrument you want.

Right. My point is that you can play that kind of music and get a very similar tone from a pedal steel, if that's what the song requires. You don't have to cart a lap steel to your pedal steel gigs to cover the "simpler" stuff. (Unless you really like switching instruments, of course.)

Right. My point is that you can play that kind of music and get a very similar tone from a pedal steel, if that's what the song requires. You don't have to cart a lap steel to your pedal steel gigs to cover the "simpler" stuff. (Unless you really like switching instruments, of course.)

Agreed, of course.

I guess I was addressing a more general sentiment that anything significantly more complex than single-note texture stuff was, essentially, a waste of time. Comments like these:

Razzle-dazzle is a thing of the past, IMO. At least, for the steel guitar. ... Bill Elm never plays chords, maybe an occasional double stop. Most of it is single note playing with an enormous variety of the most beautiful steel tones that I've found.

I would argue via Occam's Razor that a lap steel or even just a Spanish guitar would work fine and probably make more sense. I still play guitar, and if I didn't need a pedal steel, I wouldn't bring it. But for me, almost nobody I play with will accept me not bringing pedal steel. These are emphatically not country players, but they love pedal steel.

I really do think that the real future of steel will be in non-pedal instruments and outside county music. Dinosaurs my not like the idea of becoming extinct but there isn't very much they can do about it.

Time will tell, but I guess I disagree on the inevitability of this.

I simply got a cheap artisan steel to add some flavor to a few songs. The problem is, my band started wanting more and more of it and our few fans seemed to connect with it. Now, I have seven lap steels.

Wait till you get to the point where you, even accidentally, hit on some of the more harmonically interesting stuff on pedal steel. You may find that they want more and more of that too. It can be extraordinarily beautiful, and that's definitely what happened to me.

Pedal steel is a serious addiction, once exposed. My opinion, anyway.

Okay, I don't claim to be a real "tone nut", but I'll give you my impressions on the clips posted by James and Bobby. The Mazzy (slide guitar) clip features a very pronounced rattle. As one posted related, this is partly a result of the guitar being played vertically (as opposed to horizontally). But mostly, it's because the slides the guitar guys use are smaller, lighter, and hollow (and also because they can't press down too much, or the slide may "bang" at the frets as they play). A glass bar designed for playing steel has considerably more mass. That additional mass resists the string vibration a lot more, resulting in a rounder sound, but with no prominent "rattle". The steeler doesn't have to worry about the strings buzzing and clanging sounds at frets, so he naturally uses more pressure (which also results in a more solid "stable" sound). The hollow glass a slide player uses is thin and jaggy on the attack. The pickup location has less to do with the tone than where the string is picked, and the other aforementioned details.

But then again, what do I know?

Dave Mudgett wrote: I still don't see why one needs a pedal steel to play the kind of stuff linked in the original post.

You'll notice the original poster did not reference PSG. There are other kinds of steel guitar

Donny's post about fret rattle is well-taken. That's a part of the bottle-neck sound that you wouldn't be able to replicate on an sort of normal steel guitar.

Killer tone, simple playing. Here's a perfect example of that, IMHO.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iat2f4K1-aw

You can get closer to the slide guitar sound on pedal steel simply by using a grooved Dobro style bar. I use a Shubb Pearse #2. They are lighter and have a thinner sound than the typical 7/8-1" diam. PSG bar. And by using light bar pressure, you can get as much rattle as you want. A tube amp and distortion boxes also help. However, the sustain is still noticeably greater and smoother for PSG than slide on a regular electric guitar. A glass, or even a wood bar can cut down some sustain. As someone mentioned above, you can vary the tone quite a bit by picking closer to the bridge or over the neck. It's not quite the same as switching between bridge and neck pickups, but it is very similar.

I am trying to play it all on an S12U PSG - simple one-string stuff to four finger grips and strums, blues, country, jazz, classical, atmospheric-experimental, whatever. My goal is to be able to play it like a piano, in the sense that you don't switch instruments to switch styles and genres. Start with an instrument that is substantial and versatile enough to play anything, and learn to play it as well as you can in the time you have. The style, tone and genre limitations will be in my abilities, not the instrument's.

You'll notice the original poster did not reference PSG. There are other kinds of steel guitar.

Yeah I (and I think others) know that. But I also note that he's been talking a lot lately about the new pedal steel he's getting, and the discussion turned to pedal steel pretty quickly after the initial post, with this comment:

Hmmm. Record a clip of that tone on a pedal steel. Please.

I don't think there's any problem getting that general type of sound on a pedal steel with a real thin glass slide - I have one that buzzes a bit and can't really get a real solid sound, but sounds cool for certain things. As Donny says, where the string is picked affects the sound a lot also. Naturally, the amp matters a lot too.

Conversely, one can also eliminate the slide/bar rattle on a 6-string guitar by using an extension nut.

why would you want to get that tone on a pedal steel? why would you want to hammer a nail into a wall with a screwdriver? right tool for the job and all that.....

Steve Norman wrote:why would you want to get that tone on a pedal steel?

Because I'm too lazy to carry all of my instruments to every gig.

I agree with b0b. Why do people use a Matchbro or Bobro to emulate dobro on pedal steel? Why do people put extension nuts on 6-string guitars? To expand the range of the instrument, which can be very useful. Add to this the fact that many pedal steel players have - surprise - a pedal steel guitar.

In many situations, I could find use for a half dozen or more instruments, but can generally get by with two - a single PSG and an electric guitar, and sometimes, just one or the other. It's pure pragmatism.

I'm a slave to bringing multiple instruments to a gig.

I'm getting ready for a wedding and I'm learning the simple melody of "What a Wonderful World". I'm using an eBow to make it more interesting. The eBow sounds like overdrive on some of my steels and like a mellow singing voice on others. The overdriven tone sounds inappropriate (for a wedding) to me. I'm taking an extra steel just for that song.

The clips that I've heard of dobro simulators don't sound like they would fool anyone. The only decent one that I've heard was on a variax that I once owned.

The tone I hear on this Mazzy Star is not unlike that of the steel playing spoken about on the topic “Antares Inplosion" "Tequila Sunrise". Nothing personal, just an observation.