Kay Das
From:
Los Angeles CA
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Posted 31 Dec 2009 11:33 am |
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Having made a New Year resolution to work harder to promote the steel guitar, I will once in a way write a short chronicle on steel guitar topics, and call it, you've guessed right, " Steel Guitar Chronicles - x" where x will be a progressive number. Comments always invited. I intend to cover a variety of topics from old experiences, techniques I have observed, details on recordings, analysis of certain tunes and how they can be played on steel, etc etc. Here goes the first one on old experiences, hopefully will not bore anyone out of their skins too soon.
Anyone can join in anytime and have fun too.
Steel Guitar Chronicle - 1
I began (lap) steel guitar at the age of 10 and continued until my university years and then gave it up in favour of various other interests until a few years ago when a very kind gentleman in Hawaii persuaded me to take it up again ( this will be the topic of another entry).
One of the reasons I gave it up was the tuning (per the Kamiki book) lo2hi: EAEAC#E which was rather boring. To get a minor, for example, one had to detune the C# to a C. I was too wet behind the ears to experiment with other tunings. One of the reasons was that I could only get standard gauge guitar strings, not like it is today. The first focus of this chronicle is the Kamiki book which was well illustrated. No Jerry Byrd manual, this but a useful book nonetheless. It had photographs to show you how and where to hold the steel, how to wear the picks, how to achieve finger and palm harmonics. It had notes and tablature on a variety of tunes. Ua Like No Like was one of the first Hawaiian tunes I learnt. It also had Blue Danube, Over the Waves, Tales of Hoffman by Offenbach, Old Black Joe, and quite a variety of other tunes. I remember it had a rather cheesy picture of a dancing hula girl on the cover. My Mum started learning it and later gave up and gave the guitar and the book to me. The steel was shaped like a flattened sea-shell and the picks were of tortoise shell, which I later changed for metal ones. I was taught to place my two non-picking fingers on the board...something I had to unlearn many years later when Jerry Byrd verbally introduced me to the magic technique of right hand damping.
I developed a style of playing solo on my own as, until much later, I did not have many friends who could accompany me. The guitar was an acoustic one which I played with a raiser at the end of the neck. Later, my parents bought me a better guitar and I can still remember the scent of the new varnish on it. It was a beautiful piece of work, a reddish sunburst finish. I later attached a pick-up to it. This consisted of one half of an Army headphone, which reversed its function when taped to the front side of the guitar. I connected it to an input of an old Murphy radio and lo and behold I had my first "electric guitar". I learnt to play Moana Chimes and St. Louis Blues, listening every day to Garney Nyss' 78 rpm shellac. One of the problems with St Louis Blues was needing to de-tune to the minor tuning mis-stream fro the part of the tune played in the minor key.
My first concert was at age 11, playing a piece called Alpine Dreams with my music teacher accompanying me on piano. I sight read for this performance, my legs dangling from the chair provided on stage.
More another time. As stated, I got tired of the A major tuning...
Kay |
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