A different way to look at it: Can any of you imagine what it would be like if YOU wanted to develop your own PSG, adding pedals to a non-pedal guitar because you find it too limited,
without any knowledge about existing pedal steel tunings? That thought actually crossed my mind some years ago when I was living in Italy, I was recording some tunes I had written, had several 6-string guitars and one cheap 8-string lap steel. I really didn´t know anything about "real" steel tunings so I always tuned it to an open E major chord since I was a lot into blues/slide playing. Now I knew what a PSG sounded like from records and I had those country-flavored tunes that called for that sound so I tried to come somewhat close on the lap steel but there always was something missing, I thought: "I wish I had those pedals". Now there really wasn´t any information available in local music stores, Italy is not exactly "steel country"; never heard about the Steel Guitar Forum and had no computer anyway, so if I had had the mechanical devices to actually construct some kind of pedal mechanism, I probably would have made up my own tuning.
Take 6-string E major, one of my preferred slide guitar tunings, as a starting point:
E
B
G#
E
B
E
Extend it to 8 strings by putting the standard tuning´s D back in and adding a high G# to get some more high range:
G#
E
B
G#
E
D
B
E
I guess this could be called "E7".
Now, if you want to go from an E chord to an A chord, you´ve got to raise the G#´s to A, the high B to C#, lower the low B to A... remember I came from standard guitar. Wait a minute, you could also lower the D to C# along with it to get a great strummable chord!
Something´s not right yet... those
pedal steels that you see on record covers all have more than one pedal. Looks like they split those changes up somehow. It seems most logical to put the changes for the G# strings one one pedal and those for the B strings (and the D to C#)on another. Press the two together to get the chord. But two pedals still looks a bit few. How about lowering the G#´s to G, that would make a minor chord.
With a contraption like that, assuming I´d actually been able to make it work, I might have fooled around and maybe even tried to play along with some records that feature pedal steel.
That record by James Burton and Ralph Mooney is a nice one. I´ve been trying to copy Burton´s licks for so long, now let´s check out what that Mooney guy is doing. Sounds like he´s got something else still... I got it, he must have raised the high E to F#! Let´s put another pedal on... Sooner or later I might also have discovered that, in order to play scales out of bar positions, an F# string located between the middle E and G# would come very handy. This, of course, would have made it an E9 tuning. Now the question would have been, add another string and make it 9 or give up one of the low strings...
Later, Joe H.
<FONT SIZE=1 COLOR="#8e236b"><p align=CENTER>[This message was edited by Joe Henry on 14 November 2002 at 11:19 AM.]</p></FONT><FONT SIZE=1 COLOR="#8e236b"><p align=CENTER>[This message was edited by Joe Henry on 14 November 2002 at 11:49 AM.]</p></FONT><FONT SIZE=1 COLOR="#8e236b"><p align=CENTER>[This message was edited by Joe Henry on 15 November 2002 at 10:52 AM.]</p></FONT>
