The Steel Guitar Forum

I suppose it would be pushing it over the edge (literally, the edge of the fingerboard) to try to squeeze a 7th string into one of these conversions?

I could care less about upsetting the symmetry of the tuning gears...

Laurence, you are correct that there are not as many options for purchacing a non-reso acoustic lap steel as there are for a reso lap steel.

Moderately priced which I would consider to be < $1000 knocks out the custom built square neck acoustics and the Beard is the only new production model that I knnow of.

There are older square neck guitars that I see for sale but many have issues so you need to know what you're getting into when taking that route.

Regarding Weissenborn's, I have also heard that the production and lower cost models do not have good tone. Plus, you will want to play a weiss before buying because they sound different than a dreadnaught. I have a custom made weissenborn and it sounds great but I also love the tone of a converted dreadnaught.

Mark,

Right. I know about older squareneck issues to some extant since I have an old Oahu. I love it's cranky sound and will likely never give it up. Still after you play one of these for a while, you begin to see it's limitations. Which is how we got here.

(Old Martin and Gibson hawaiians probably have issues too perhaps most significantly price tags and conversions to standard guitars.)

As for Weissenborns, yeah I know they're different, but they're also an important non-resonator option (by which I mean I want one of those too!). I recently played a really lovely Asher at one of the shops on 48th Street, but that's way out of my price range.

I was thinking of the the afor-mentioned Epi, because like the old Roy Smeck models it's a 12-fret round shouldered dreadnought.

ciao,
LP