If You Could Design Your Own Pedal Steel

[Tom Gorr]

Mac... saw that master craft logo on your bandsaw .. and I knew you were a canuck...lol.... very interesting approach!

[Jim Pitman]

Cool design Mac!
I'm looking forward to hear how it performs.
I'm not sure where you pedal stop is at the moment but I'd suggeset getting it as close to the changer as possible to minimize the affect temperature change has on a pull rod.

[Eric Moon]

This is a great question. My hopes and dreams fall into three categories.

1) Real (already have it)

- Lightweight
- wide 6-string spacing for ebow use.
- two movable pickups
- easily interchangable pickups with a solderless connection.
- stereo output with respective tone controls for each pickup
- pickup selection (effects chain selection) controlled by a stereo 2-axis volume pedal where the Y axis controls volume and the X axis controls a blend pot.

Do you have any pics of this beast? I assume you made it yourself. I play with my fingers, so if there are wide-string-spaced steels out there, I'd like to know about them!

Also curious about your pickup swap idea. Do you have to take the strings off, or do the pickups slide out to the side?

Yeah, just really curious about what this looks like!

[Alan Brookes]

...I play with my fingers, so if there are wide-string-spaced steels out there, I'd like to know about them!...

I, too, play with my fingers. I used to use fingerpicks a lot, for guitar, banjo, steel, etc., but I find that I have more of a personal contact with the strings when the picks are not in the way. I also have big fingers, and I prefer the fingerboard on a classical guitar to those on most of today's jumbos and archtops. For that reason, most of the non-pedal steels feel much more comfortable to me than pedal steels, with their tight clearances. The exception, of course, is the Harlin MultiKord, which had a wide string spacing, but since it preceded all the other pedal steels it cannot be considered as a modern pedal steel, although, to my mind, its concept is far in advance of all those that followed it.

[James Mayer]

This is a great question. My hopes and dreams fall into three categories.

1) Real (already have it)

- Lightweight
- wide 6-string spacing for ebow use.
- two movable pickups
- easily interchangable pickups with a solderless connection.
- stereo output with respective tone controls for each pickup
- pickup selection (effects chain selection) controlled by a stereo 2-axis volume pedal where the Y axis controls volume and the X axis controls a blend pot.

Do you have any pics of this beast? I assume you made it yourself. I play with my fingers, so if there are wide-string-spaced steels out there, I'd like to know about them!

Also curious about your pickup swap idea. Do you have to take the strings off, or do the pickups slide out to the side?

Yeah, just really curious about what this looks like!

Here ya go. I didn't go solderless with the pickups, but they could be removed without taking off the strings, you'd just have to flip the steel over and desolder the mains then remove the bracket screws on the top.

The pickups can be stereo in two different ways. 1) Each pickup can be output to a separate channel or 2) the treble and bass strings can be split and output to separate channels. It's hum-canceling in both modes.

Sadly, this has been packed up for almost three years due to marriage, moving abroad, and misc other priorities. I'm considering selling it.