The Steel Guitar Forum

Semanticizing....I've noticed when the steel player stands up his lap disappears... so then he's playing ..a console , which I guess makes him feel better... ...of course he could be consoled while sitting down and still be called a lap steeler , which would not make him happy...even if he is lapping the field ..yup.. very disconsolate...
and speaking of slants...don't like to be called that...
we're Asian Americans.. ..so just reverse your thinking on that...okay, i'm gonna palm mute myself right now...

Good one Doc!

G'day Allen.

Yes, I'm a strange one, and I know it. They say it's only insanity if you don't know it!

As a musician I'm kind of a 'Jack-of-all-trades-and-master-of-none." Started out doing formal training with a teacher when I was a young fella, playing clarinet, but an injury put an end to that years ago. I played nothing at all for decades but we had all the kids taught music. Then came the day I picked up a guitar in middle age and the tragic consequences continue to this day. I was down in Stafford at Morris Bros. last week and bought another baritone ukelele. I now have two of them. I said it was tragic!!! I'm gonna have to build another room on the house for all this stuff!

Chris

Suggestion for custom inlay work, with apologies to Todd...

The other day my 5 year old daughter called my lap steel console "leg guitar" as it got legs. I think I prefer steel guitar though some confuse it with a guitar with steel strings.
John

After an abundance of tomatoes, cabbage, and onions are thrown at me......mine is referred to as a Vegetable Cart........

I would say that the term, "Steel Guitar," is a general term describing any guitar that is played with a metal tone bar. Lap steel, console steel, resonator steel and pedal steel are more refined terms that designate specific types of steel guitar.

Also, since it came up - any horizontal guitar-type instrument played with a ceramic, stone, glass, or high-tech-plastic bar. Seems to me steel guitar is just as much, if not more, a style of playing rather than a specific instrument?

I tell people that I play blues on my nylon string guitar in the steel guitar STYLE. It seems the logical way of communicating the idea to people. I certainly don't know any other way of explaining it. People seem to readily understand that. I'm using a Shubb GS bar & my guitar is laying across my lap. I don't really care what someone might call it but I can't say it's a trombone.

As part of my "banter" in between songs, I hold up the bar and tell the audience "this is why it's called a STEEL guitar, because I play it with this steel bar" now if I used a glass/or polimer bar that would make it confusing... is it still a "steel" guitar?

I always use my perfomance as a teaching moment, and usually explain the history of the Hawaiian style of guitar playing, and then I will play a Hawaiian song.

Then later I will play a "Western" song and make the connection with "Cowboy music" (Classic Country, etc)

Dom

I call it steel guitar. I am a steel guitarist.

Some of us use pedals to achieve the sound we are looking for and some of us do not. I consider "non pedal" or "lap steel" to be almost like disclaimers for the general public or band leaders to warn them about the instrument being the limited interpretation of steel guitar. Saying lap steel is like saying "Don't expect too much out of this thing because it's not a pedal steel" or something along those lines.

I feel a master player can squeeze just as much music out of a steel without pedals as with a steel with pedals. It might not sound exactly the same but it is be an instance of 6 of one, a half dozen of the other.

I recall an article for the Hawaiian Steel Guitar Association website written by Jerry Byrd where he was complaining about people calling it "lap steel" or in the instance of those really in the dark, "slide guitar". He said he had no problem correcting people when they called it by a funny name other than steel guitar.

I was playing on a record a couple of weeks ago where the producer (from Los Angeles) repeatedly referred to my steel (a 1954 Dual Eight Fender) as if it were a pedal steel guitar. He called it a "pedal". Plain and simple, "pedal". Let's have you put some pedal on this next song". I corrected him and said,'this is not a "pedal" or a "pedal steel". Pedal steel is what put my instrument and the people who played it out of business in the 1950s. This is a steel guitar." The producer then said, "Well, you sure make it sound like it has pedals!" which I took as a compliment. I'm sure he had assumed I was playing a pedal steel out there in the room because he had probably only heard "lap" steel played with single notes and distortion in the past and never thought big chords, harmonies and moving tones could come out of an old board with strings on it. I felt I had showed him that the instrument was equally as valid as it's more mechanically advanced sibling.

-Chris

Chris Scruggs wrote:.....I'm sure he had assumed I was playing a pedal steel out there in the room because he had probably only heard "lap" steel played with single notes and distortion in the past and never thought big chords, harmonies and moving tones could come out of an old board with strings on it. I felt I had showed him that the instrument was equally as valid as it's more mechanically advanced sibling.

-Chris

This is precisely what I was referring to in my initial post! You see, there is a difference and you just pointed it out. Yes, they are both steel guitars, but "lap steel" gives the impression that it is smaller, not only in size, but in scope--it has to do with the player. I feel like I fall in to the steel guitar camp now because I've broadened my own scope.

Jerry Byrd could be referred to as playing a "lap steel guitar" when he played his Rickenbacher, but he was in no way a lap steel player.

There is a huge heated thread going on now over in pedal steel about the entrenched belief that in order to play "real" pedal steel, you have to have 10 strings and a 3/4 minimum setup...(anything less than that is impossible to play music on). I use to play pedals and it baffled me just how anyone could make music on a 6 sting non-pedal. But I have fallen in love with "straight steel" ( yet another moniker) and yesterday played such a moving version of Jerry Byrds Estrillita ( on a lowly B6) that I almost brought my own self to tears ( the astonishment I actually pulled it off was just as emotional) . I thought you could never have that much emotion and individuality on pedals - I understood what Jerry meant in his numerous writings on that topic and why he never went over to pedals, even at the expense of his studio career.

BTW Chris, I'll be seeing you perform at the Southern Folklife Steel Guitar Symposium on March 23d. Love to meet you.

Bobby Black does an excellent 6 string version of Estrellita. There are some gigs where that 6 string is all he brings with him. He also does play D8 console and D10 pedal all depending on the situation.