The Steel Guitar Forum

Well my Artisan finally got here very late this afternoon.
Hey it has black legs. Hope thats a plus!

I seem to be having a couple problems though.

First of all my tone bar is still back-ordered along with the starter kit I ordered, so I'm sort of making do with what I can find around the house. A wine bottle glass slide and the back side of an old Special 20 haromica.

Since I was eager to try it out, I decided to just tune the strings that shipped with it to standard guitar tuning EADGBE. I'm using a BOSS TU-15 tuner. The strings do seem to be flimsy, but I figured that they would be OK for regular tuning. Anyways, when I would get within a tone or semi-tone of the 6th E string or the 5th A string, I started getting real bad buzzes and rattles. I can't tell where there coming from. I thought that maybe I needed to take it up another octave. I wound up popping the high E string.

Maybe the strings were improperly installed before shipping.

Is there a correct way to put string on this type of headstock? I can do a regular guitar pretty good, but I'm not very sure about how to go about putting these on. I guess you would call it a classical style headstock.

I went to Guitar Center and tried to find some regular electric strings .013-.054 for an open E tuning. which they didn;t have, so here's what I wound up with.

one set of Erine Ball nickle wound 12 16 24p 32 44 56

one set of D'Addario XL 7-string nickle round regular light gauge .010 .013 .017 .026 .036 .046 .056

What would be the best way to mix and match these strings for something fairly usable for an open E tuning or a C6 tuning?

I'm hoping that heavier strings will eliminate the buzz/rattle issue.

On the nut does the notch for each string make much difference or does the windings on the wound strings maybe cause some binding/friction. They basicly look like theyre notched only to provide proper string spacing.

I'm gonna wait before I put some more strings on until I here I find a good and simple way to do it right.

What little bit I did fool with it, I really realized how much help I need!

Hope to here from somebody soon.

Steve

Hi Steve:

I have two Artisans. One tuned open E,
E A E A C E, thats low to high. 34, 30, 26, 22Wound and 18 and 14 plain.Stainless Steel Wound.

C6th tuning=C E G A C E. 36, 32, 24 wound and 20, 17, 14 plain. Nickel wound.The strings sound good on mine. I like the C6th tuning best sounds great, after you figure out witch strings to play and witch ones to skip. Also lots of info on differant sights for C6th. http://www.homestead.com/dennysguitars/

Steve says,

<SMALL>....I'm sort of making do with what I can find around the house. A wine bottle glass slide and the back side of a.... haromica.</SMALL>

Try a small broom handle.

or a deep socket . .

I used a spark plug socket for years.

I think I'd try upping the tuning to open G. Just a guess, to get the tension.

A couple of traditional sources (George L's and Ernie Ball) of the tone bars have been out of stock for some time now and no projected date of shipping as of today. I would suggest trying typical steel guitar stores for either used or new bullet bars from different sources such as John Pearse or Bill Stroud (BJS) or typical lap steel bars such as the Stevens type or Shubb Pearse.<font size="1" color="#8e236b"><p align="center">[This message was edited by Jim Palenscar on 08 January 2006 at 05:46 AM.]</p></FONT>

When I recieved my black Artisan a few years ago, I had to fiddle around with it and tweak 'this 'n that' on it to get it to sound right. That's about parr for the course on cheap instruments, though.

I would bet that they're not assembled by Luthiers; rather made in the same factory that all those folding kick-scooters came out of.

Lap steels take a higher gauge string than a normal guitar. For open D tuning I generally use Dobro strings, Nickel ones are best and can be ordered from our in-house string Guru, b0b. Lap steel strings aren't being bent so when you play the instrument with a bar it will feel flimsy with normal guitar strings.

No matter what bar or substitute you use, you will find that because of the gauge differences, at the first fret especially, a bit more pressure will be needed to get rid of the rattle and some finger contact behind the bar to dampen the harmonics between the bar and headstock.

Scotty's Music has a nice selection of bars, and has strings for whatever tuning you want to use. http://scottysmusic.com

The 056 thru 013 is ok for E on that short scale, try the sparkplug socket, you need the mass/weight. And Don is right about tweeking stuff in, but wait till you try a real bar.

BTW- E tuning lo-hi is: EBEG#BE

it it feels too stiff, just drop it to open D (all strings one step down)

For the time being I'm using the .056-.013 strings and a 17mm sparkplug socket about 2 1/2 x 7/8 at least until I can get something better.

But man did I had a heck of a time getting this sucker strung up. Is there some kind of trick to getting the strings through the tailpiece holes and up and over the top of each individual saddle. I basicly had to barely stick the string through bridgeplate hole and then try to get under the string with a little screwdriver and lift it enough to grab it with my fingers. Each string took some time as I kept poking the saddles around but I finally got it. There's got to be a better/easier way.

I went through and tightend all the screws I could find.

I'm not very sure about how well I secured the strings - experimental I suppose. I tried to line all the peghead holes at about a 45% angle and just stuck the string through and pulled it back under. Seems that I made more of a mess than anything else. Some are real sloppy others tightend up way to soon. But it finally tuned up.

Got the Cindy Cashdollar DVD's today but haven't had a chance to look at them yet.

Oh yeah, one other thing it seems that every now and then when I touch the guitar I get a small little static like pop. My other guitars don't do this. Same carpet, same amp, same guitar output cable unless it might be going bad. Has anybody else noticed this pop or static.

thanks

Steve

What I did to get the strings to go through the bridge is this: I took the very tip of the string, stuck it into the hole, then bent the string so that little piece was pointing upwards. Then I stuck that bent up piece of the string through the hole all the way. It stuck up enough that I could grab the string and finish feeding it through the hole.
When I was finished stringing the guitar, that little piece is cut off anyway, so no problem.
I still don't get why they have that adjustable bridge on there, unless they have a lot of parts left over from some other guitar model.

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