Learning Pedal Steel
Posted: 19 Jan 2010 8:30 pm
I have been learning pedal steel since 1972. For 35 years I was a pretty serious student, and for the last three years I have been an absolute fanatic, with no real interest in anything else.
But, partly because I live someplace where pedal steel guitarists are few and far between, and partly because I am a stubborn "rugged individualist," I have been teaching myself, rather than using books, tab, video, or private lessons.
How do I teach myself? With difficulty, yes. But luckily I have been teaching others for more than thirty years -- hundreds of guitarists and a few dozen bass players, plus a smattering of banjo, mandolin, keyboard, percussion, pedal steel, harmonica, fiddle, and slide guitar students. Some classroom teaching, but mostly private lessons...
I have had students who were brain damaged, psychotic, dyslexic, addicted, obsessive, depressive, developmentally disabled, and just plain stupid, and I have had about a hundred students who claim to have attention deficit disorder.
So luckily I have some tools for dealing with my own deficits and disabilities. I can observe my own playing and figure out what needs to change and what needs to be improved, just as I do while observing any other student.
So yesterday I had a big breakthrough. Left hand, left hand, left hand! When I first started playing pedal steel I was already a serious guitarist, used to having fixed frets, and my terrible intonation drove me crazy. So for decades I have concentrated on intonation with my left hand. And recently I have re-examined how I mute the strings behind the bar, and have experimented with more pressure on the bar when I go for the higher frets, which is helpful.
But yesterday something that I often say to guitar students turned out to be an epiphany for me: I am always telling them to hold the flatpick near the tip so they can feel the strings. There are no nerves in a flatpick, I tell them, but somehow they have to learn which string they are about to pick and exactly how the pick is going to set the string to vibrating.
So yesterday I realized that I have always concentrated on where the bar is (intonation) rather than what the bar feels like as it moves around on the strings. I have to somehow extend my "nerves" into the bar so I can feel how it is touching the strings!
And as soon as I started thinking about that, and paying attention to exactly how the bar caresses the strings, then my tone improved a lot. I have been struggling trying to get chords with that exquisite tonal blend that the great country players get, so I have been trying lots of different right hand approaches, and have tried hundreds of different eq and reverb settings on several different amps. But as soon as I stopped thinking of the bar as an inanimate object and started imagining that I could actually feel what it "feels" as it touches the strings, then I was getting tone that would make a dead man smile.
In recent years I bought a new steel, a new bar, and a new volume pedal. I have critiqued and improved my left hand, my right hand, my pedal work, my knee movements, and my volume pedal technique. I have stayed awake many a night thinking of new chords and new scales and new tricks. But all that time I was pushing that bar around as if it was just a piece of steel rolling around on some strings. As soon as I thought of it "caressing" those strings, and tried to feel the strings through the bar, instant magic.
Hope this is of interest to someone else. I just thought that a progress report on my personal pedal steel quest might be entertaining or useful somehow. This is all I think about these days, and my wife is tired of hearing about my pedal steel obsession, so I guess I just had to tell somebody...
But, partly because I live someplace where pedal steel guitarists are few and far between, and partly because I am a stubborn "rugged individualist," I have been teaching myself, rather than using books, tab, video, or private lessons.
How do I teach myself? With difficulty, yes. But luckily I have been teaching others for more than thirty years -- hundreds of guitarists and a few dozen bass players, plus a smattering of banjo, mandolin, keyboard, percussion, pedal steel, harmonica, fiddle, and slide guitar students. Some classroom teaching, but mostly private lessons...
I have had students who were brain damaged, psychotic, dyslexic, addicted, obsessive, depressive, developmentally disabled, and just plain stupid, and I have had about a hundred students who claim to have attention deficit disorder.
So luckily I have some tools for dealing with my own deficits and disabilities. I can observe my own playing and figure out what needs to change and what needs to be improved, just as I do while observing any other student.
So yesterday I had a big breakthrough. Left hand, left hand, left hand! When I first started playing pedal steel I was already a serious guitarist, used to having fixed frets, and my terrible intonation drove me crazy. So for decades I have concentrated on intonation with my left hand. And recently I have re-examined how I mute the strings behind the bar, and have experimented with more pressure on the bar when I go for the higher frets, which is helpful.
But yesterday something that I often say to guitar students turned out to be an epiphany for me: I am always telling them to hold the flatpick near the tip so they can feel the strings. There are no nerves in a flatpick, I tell them, but somehow they have to learn which string they are about to pick and exactly how the pick is going to set the string to vibrating.
So yesterday I realized that I have always concentrated on where the bar is (intonation) rather than what the bar feels like as it moves around on the strings. I have to somehow extend my "nerves" into the bar so I can feel how it is touching the strings!
And as soon as I started thinking about that, and paying attention to exactly how the bar caresses the strings, then my tone improved a lot. I have been struggling trying to get chords with that exquisite tonal blend that the great country players get, so I have been trying lots of different right hand approaches, and have tried hundreds of different eq and reverb settings on several different amps. But as soon as I stopped thinking of the bar as an inanimate object and started imagining that I could actually feel what it "feels" as it touches the strings, then I was getting tone that would make a dead man smile.
In recent years I bought a new steel, a new bar, and a new volume pedal. I have critiqued and improved my left hand, my right hand, my pedal work, my knee movements, and my volume pedal technique. I have stayed awake many a night thinking of new chords and new scales and new tricks. But all that time I was pushing that bar around as if it was just a piece of steel rolling around on some strings. As soon as I thought of it "caressing" those strings, and tried to feel the strings through the bar, instant magic.
Hope this is of interest to someone else. I just thought that a progress report on my personal pedal steel quest might be entertaining or useful somehow. This is all I think about these days, and my wife is tired of hearing about my pedal steel obsession, so I guess I just had to tell somebody...