The Steel Guitar Forum

Today after four years of not playing the steel I finally sat down to start over... and starting over's exactly what it is!

I recently traded my Carter D-10, back to Carter for a more manageable S-10; it arrived a week or so ago and I have diddled around with it a little - tonight I played about an hour, my first true practice session.

I watch the guys on U-tube who make it seem so effortless and become discouraged - I'm almost 50 and the old dog new tricks... but I am reminded of a time when, learning 6-string, I had to form chords by physically rearranging my left fingers with my right hand, and then strumming a thunky chord till it rang true. But I was 18 then...

It is so darned challenging to keep the bar in tune while striking the correct strings and coordinating the pedal/knee motion. When I concentrate on one the others fall apart.

Tone? HAH! My pedal steel sounds like a grade-school violin when I play it... but in the hands of a guy like Burnell Groft the darned thing changes its personality and is cooperative as heck - for other people.

I watch my left hand move the bar and find that my right hand has drifted way out of 'position' and is reaching around with my elbow sticking WAAAY out....

I watch my right hand and can't find an intonated note to save my soul...

I think a string has gone out of tune, but, NOPE! It's my stupid knee applying some pressure to the lever or a leaden foot 'resting' on the pedal a little too hard...

...But man will prevail over machine and not give up, thanks to the wonderful folks on this board. This place is all I need to keep me encouraged and motivated to improve my playing (and 'fun-factor'..)



Someday I hope to make my presence here worthwhile and provide answers rather than questions...

Thanks for being here everybody!

Landon Johnson

Landon,
I've just started learning the PSG at age 50 as well.
I know your pain! Hang in there man.

Hi Landon,
I put it down for about 25 years and picked it back up at age 49 -- almost a year ago, which puts me at age you-know-what. Years have taken their toll in the realm of being able to carry the damn thing around without throwing my back out, and foot cramps, of all things, when mashing one pedal without mashing the adjacent one.

But as my guitar teacher told me when I was 17, "make haste slowly." And it's a helluva lot easier to go slow at 50 than it was back then. So there's a silver lining.

Try working on stuff you never played before rather than retracing old ground. It's less frustrating, & then when you go back to the old stuff it comes back a lot faster.

Have fun - & remember, not only do you get to play a fantastic instrument, you get to sit down while you're doing it.

I quit for 25 years and dragged it out from under the bed again in my late 50s. I've been back at it a few years now and am just now getting to where I can stand to listen to myself. But it's been worth the journey.

Landon, from reading your post I figure you are in the Hanover area, if you know Burnell. I am just up the road in Bonneauville and I work in Hanover. I too started learning when I was near 50 and I have never played any other instrument. Everything in your post, sounds like I wrote it!! If you want to get together one day and commiserate, let me know and we can both have a good laugh together

Hi you kid's

I started learning pedal steel at 65, I'm now 66 ,still having a struggle ,amazing myself , and loving it.

Regards to all

I am one of those who laid my steel guitar under the bed for 23 yrs.

Working two jobs, supporting a wonderful wife and raising 5 kids doesn't leave much time to play the guitar.

What you are saying rings a bell with all steel guitar players. Everyone has felt like you at first.

These guys who make beautiful music and make it look easy didn't accomplish that kind of ability over night.

Most will tell you even today, that they are not satisfied with their own playing ability. That's why we keep practicing.

I guess I can chime in with some words of encouragement. I started at age 53,just 3 months ago. I have never played guitar before. I wanted to, but life does take strange turns. Take one day at a time. Set small goals. When I don't put enough pressure on the bar and get one of those "banjo-like" cords, I cringe and then try again a little slower. The thing is, just like everyone else is saying, Hang in there!

P.S. Danny seem like a great guy, but I don't think I am related to him in anyway. It's a common name.

Landon,

Having just started learning psg late last year and being nearly 50, I stay focused on the journey of learning, not so much the end. I figure there really is no end.

Now that I look at it this way, I get great satisfaction from the small things: making an intune quick move high on the neck, executing a simple interval change that causes Miss Annie our vocalist to turn around with delight, grabbing the right grip. Like they say, it't the one great shot on the golf course that keeps you comin' back.

That being said, the majority of the time I'm applying a little pressure to A while pressing B, catchin' the Eb at the I or IV position, missing the B on a BC change...all the normal stuff.

Practice end enjoy the journey. If it was easy everybody would do it, and you wouldn't get the great satisfaction of what you hit great! (and I'm sure you do).

Brian

I quit playing when I was 36. I had played on and off for ten years and was really mediocre. I sat it aside to go back to graduate school and then to raise my son. I seldomed played for the next 15 years. At 50, I got geared up to return to playing. The last 4 years I've gotten down to serious practicing and had the opportunity to get a few lessons from some real pickers. This past year, things began to flow and now I'm playing with a cool rockabilly/c&w group. Now I'm 56 and I'm having the time of my life. Patience is definitely a virtue with pedal steel.

It might be a good idea to play lap steel for a little while, just to get your hands together.

I started playing marimba late in life. To ramp up, I learned conga and bongo techniques, then picked up two mallets on a little diatonic xylophone. I spent about two years getting into percussion. The big marimba was still daunting when it arrived, but at least my hands were used to doing rhythm things. I was totally ready to pick up the 4 mallets.

All of the moves have to become reflexes before you can actually play good music. The only way to build reflexes is through repetitive practice. Joe Wright calls it "muscle memory". That kind of repetitive practice isn't musical, but it's necessary if you want to free your brain to think about music instead of concentrating on the mechanics of playing.

The great musicians are always a few beats ahead in their minds. They aren't thinking about the execution of the notes that they've already decided to play. They are thinking about what they will play next, as their muscles carry out the commands that they dispatched a moment or two ago.

just curious...why did you all quit for so long?
bored? fed up? no time?

and a followup...what was it that made you start again?

Hmm, at first I thought the subject title had "space bar" and punctuation errors during typing, and was a reference to my character : "Suchan, Unmanageable Beast" . My wife sez it wouldn't be without a certain amount of truth.

Keep on pickin'!
Glenn

Things that became clothes racks in the bedroom...

Exercize cycle
Weight Bench
Rowing Machine
Even the computer table...

Do not humiliate the machine by laying anything on it other than the cover or the bar and picks!

Ben, I quit to go back to school and learn a profession with a more steady income. I wanted to some day be able to marry, buy a house and have kids. Looking around at other musicians, except for a few superstars and A team session players, guys would go out on the road for a few years while they were young. Then when they wanted to settle down, they would have to start some other trade or profession from scratch. I was already in my late 20s and decided if I was going to have to start something from scratch it was already time for me to do it. So I went back to college and then graduate school, started a career, got married, and had four kids. A few years agoa when I got divorced I suddenly only had the kids half the time. Rather than spend my free time puttering around the yard and working on my house, I let all that go and started playing music again. Something like this seems to be a fairly common pattern.

Also, in my younger years, I never stuck with one instrument long enough to get professionally proficient. After playing piano, sax and guitar, I started playing Dobro and steel in my 20s. If I had stayed with a single instrument from a young age and had become a really professional player with top potential, it might have been a different story. This latter seems a fairly common pattern among the very top players who earn a good steady living playing music.

I'm with David regarding the lengthy hiatus from steel. Making a living, continuing the education, and raising a family does cut into the practice time. I found my interest just shifted for quite a while. I never lost my admiration of music and the steel guitar...I just didn't have the time to do it justice. As for Landon and anyone else aspiring to improve at steel, it just seems to be pretty time consuming. Since I now have more free time, it's a little easier to be committed to "the beast".

This thread is scaring the crap out of me! I'm 36, just entering grad school and hoping to latch onto some kind of steady work when I graduate next year. Don't tell me I'm gonna put that steel under the bed!!

Than again, I play about 10 shows a month on steel, the odd session, and just got a call for a possible November tour of Eastern Canada on steel, so I guess it's not an option right now.

I can't imagine ever putting it aside. Did some of you feel that way and then just bang! put it away?

I guess the Steel Forum keeps me hooked as well. Maybe the forum has also helped many get reconnected with the steel after many years away from it.

My son is 6 years old, daughter is 4, i'm 42 and mother of my children looks like 17. Kids have babysitter for 15 weekdays per month, i'll do the rest. I've got my first steel couple of months ago and i'm a co-owner of a smaaaaall village restaurant.
DON'T PUT ME DOWN NOW BROTHERS!
I'M GONNA LEARN THAT DARN THING!!!!

Chris, you don't have to put it under the bed in grad school, etc. In fact, if I had it to do over again, I would have kept playing, even if only for myself. I never consciously decided to quit playing altogether, it just happened. When I first went back to college in Nashville and Knoxville, I kept playing in bands on weekends. But when I got to grad school in L.A. (molecular biology at USC), one of my professors was a bluegrass fiddle player. I told him I played Dobro and pedal steel. He said I could kiss it goodbye, because in grad school they will work you so hard you wont have the time and energy for it. He likened going into a hard science in graduate school to going into a monestary as a monk. It turned out he was pretty much right.

However, part of the problem was that I was new in L.A. and didn't know a soul, much less any country or country-rock musicians. And I didn't take the time to go out and look for any. Country-rock was my true love, and it was sort of passing away, and punk and New Wave and disco were taking over. So I just let it all slide. In retrospect, it didn't have to be that way. If I had really wanted to, I could have kept on playing, even if on a small scale.

So if you love the music, and love playing steel. Just keep right on playing through everything, even if you have to scale it down or just play for yourself temporarily.

I put it down because I got bored with not getting any better. I have always been the type of person who could pick up any instrument (brass, strings, winds) and be able to eke out a few scales in a few minutes and then play it well enough to jam in a month or so. Not so with the steel, but rather than see it as a challenge I slipped back into my six string fretted comfort level. And I have always endeavored to play instruments that weren't all that common (bassoon, english horn, tuba) so I'd always have places to 'jam' (quotes because 'jam' and 'bassoon just don't appear in the same sentence very often...)

I picked it up again after searching for a way to sell it, actually, and discovered this forum as part of that process. After lurking for a while, I decided to try again, traded by 1996 D-10 back to Carter for a more manageable, less intimidating S-10 and voila... here I am.

It is the support and fellowship of this forum that brought me back - had I known about this forum in 1996 I probably never woulda quit, and might be able to play a whole scale without messing up by now

If you're thinking about putting your steel under the bed, consider that Bud Carter or Shot Jackson (?) is in that case saying, "You'll be back..."

Landon

why quit/start?
Another grad school victim I guess ... no more roadwork with country bands; and I got more seriously into playing jazz guitar and was a long way from playing jazz on steel. Got back into it after I was coerced into playing guitar in a hard/pop rock cover band -- very good players but not much fun -- & quit, went looking for a dobro and there she was - my new steel.

Landon, my first gig(and one of my weirdest)after a long hiatus from gigging at all included a bassoonist, doing free improv. He was pretty good, too.

landon,
i quit playing for 6 years after playing for 22 years
in bar's and what ever. played six string for that 6 years and got the bug to go back to steel. the one thing that i learn is to start slow_____ then work up
to speed . first get your "grips" on the strings first then work from there get all the info you can here on the forum and "stick with it" there is a ton of info here so look into it. i am now back or better than i was and playing in a country band.. just keep going....OH, buy the way i will be "60" in dec

P.W.

Ben, I quit back around 1983, after playing for seven years, because I had gotten serious about classical guitar and decided that I'd never do it justice unless I gave up all my other guitars. (*sigh*, the folly of youth)

Once I started my doctoral degree the classical guitar went bye-bye too. I gradually started playing acoustic guitar for fun over the past five or six years and one day two years ago, completely out of the blue, decided I MUST play pedal steel again. Kind of like that moment in the (original) Manchurian Candidate when someone shows the guy the queen of hearts (I think that's the card) and he suddly goes into killer zombie mode.

I am sure I progressed farther in a few months this time around than in all my years of playing earlier, partly because I had studied so much music in the interim, but largely because of this forum. Thanks to everyone who has given me help and advice for the past two years!

Dan

Yeah, the steel is a different animal. I can put away my six string for a while, as I have often since playing steel, and pick it up and get back in the saddle with out too much trouble. Same with sax, even though I never got too good on it, I can pick it up and play okay while my embouchure painfully comes back. But the steel is harder to get back to: the few times I've stopped playing for a time it's taken a lot of time to get it back.....I think it's just a lot more complicated, and the tone and execution is a pretty elusive thing when you are out of practice. I think it's a lot harder to get by faking and hacking it on the steel than on other instruments--not that you would ever want to, but I think there's less instant gratification with the steel than with other instruments. One thing that is good is that my right hand is becoming more and more second nature after struggling with that for a long time: it just seems to be falling into place naturally, so I guess there is progress even if it seems slow. But hey, the challenge and complexity is part of the charm of this wonderful instrument.

What is it about grad school? Well, I was into guitar, not steel back then - but I quit playing completely for several years while in grad school. I agree with David that in, at least in the technical and scientific areas, it's all or nothing - mine was EE at Yale. Packed up the guitars in the basement of the grad school apartment and pretty much forgot about them until after I was finished with my comprehensive exams and had my dissertation proposal accepted.

But then - WHAM! - got the bug again while I was visiting with Jonathan Rose in his guitar shop down in Hendersonville, TN. Woulda' been real easy to never finish that Ph.D. dissertation, but I somehow got it done.

I do agree that it would have probably been better if I had continued playing just a bit while I was in grad school. But gigging? Forget it. I never would have lived through it.

I didn't start playing PSG until I was well into my 40s. I wouldn't get too discouraged. Yeah, this thing is a bit of a beast, but it's worth it and there's lots of help here.