The Steel Guitar Forum

I'm trying to learn lap steel. I am using E7 as my tuning (Low to high - B-D-E-G#-B-E)

Can anyone offer some advice on learning all of the notes on the board and some good shapes for chords?

Thanks!

http://www.looknohands.com/chordhouse/g ... ex_rb.html

Just change the tuning on the site and it gives you chords, scales, the whole 9 yards.

This CHORDHOUSE site is great in that you can mess around with the tuning and see what happens as you change notes.

Since you're a rock/jam/blues guy you can (on chordhouse site) see how this version of E7 fits (lo-to-hi...E-B-D-G#-B-E). This way you are very close to E Major tuning from regular guitar work.

Or, how about this version of E9 (lo-to-hi...E-F#-G#-B-E-D) with 3 pairs of string a whole tone apart which sets up dom7 work nicely without slants.

Have fun.

With steel guitar, you have to learn to live with partial chords. Looking at your tuning, here's what I see (besides the obvious):

Bmi (B, D)
Bb7 (D, G#)
Abmi (G#, B)

See what I mean? There's not a ton of harmonic stuff in there because 2 of the notes are doubled (B and E), which is fine--you play octaves and outline the chords by creating moving lines up and down the neck.

It may seem a little foreign to you, but what I do is tune string 4 to F#, giving me:

E
B
G#
F#
D
B

There are a ton more sounds in this E9 tuning than the other E7 tuning, in my opinion. Could be a little harder to wrap your head around, though. The good news is that it's also easy for you to tune to C6, should you choose to.

Thanks guys!! I think I was a little naive getting into this. haha. I've played guitar for 25 years and have picked up other instruments pretty quickly in that time simply by watching people. I'm fairly humbled by the level of difficulty on this instrument. I'm actually thinking that I might look for a local teacher to get me going in the right direction. We'll see.

I think I'm going to be sticking with this tuning for now (E7). If nothing else, I've used open E on guitar for slide playing so I can kind of get through a blues tune with it and not sound like a total amateur. When I get the techniques of playing down a little better I might look into some other tunings.

It's funny that 25 years into playing music that this thing came along and really presented a challenge for me! I guess that's good news really. Standard guitar just came very naturally for me.

Well, enough out of me. Gotta go practice! Thanks guys!