The Steel Guitar Forum

I was surfing around to find a new tune to practice with and came upon "Beneath Still Waters". It's a beautiful melody and yielded some good things for me as a beginner. Especially in transitioning in and out of the V7 to the I ( key of G 3rd fret ) using the B pedal and the 2nd KL.

Btw....I have four knee levers.....what are the abbreviations for these, so I'll know what others mean and so I won't look so stupid?

From the point of the player, the 3letter code just means position and direction:
LKL: Left Knee (moves) Left
LKR: Left Knee Right
RKL: Right Knee Left
RKR: Right Knee Right

That just tells you where they are: there's no consensus on what they do.

I was watching Micky Adams teaching videos and he was refering to them as E & F etc. He sort of lost me as to which was which.

A fairly common setup is to have E strings (4 and 8) raised to F (often referred to as the F lever) on LKL, and lowered to Eb (most times called E lever) on LKR. This arrangement may be said to have E's on the left. This is indeed a confusing phrase, since E's here is referring to both the raise and lower levers. There is only one E lever and one F lever, but together in plural they are called the E levers. Confused yet? Good! It gets trickier.

There are many variations on lever placement. Some players prefer to split the E's, meaning that the raise and lower levers are on opposite knees. For instance, the F lever may be located at LKL, but the E lever is moved to RKL (or RKR).

For these reasons its often easier to indicate the function by letter (E or F) rather than by position (LKR or LKL).

The D lever (often found at RKR) lowers D# to D on string 2, though not everyone refers to it as such. Some prefer to call the E lower lever the D lever since D# is enharmonic to Eb. A 4th lever may be called any number of letters based on its function (ie. a G lever to manipulate G# strings 1 and 7). A vertical lever usually on the left (LKV) which may lower B's is sometimes called the X lever. As you can see, some of these terms do not make sense, but as long as the function of the lever is understood, whatever naming convention is used will work.

But Clete, those designations aren't really universal: the F lever is *close* but on at least one course Buddy called it E.
Some call the E lowers "D" (since they go to D#, or perhaps it's the first change invented after the three pedals), and I've seen the 2nd string lower called the E lever.

Yes, very true Lane. Thats why I used terms like often, sometimes, and most times etc. My point was that though there really is no universally accepted format, as long as whatever format you are using is understood as far as function, that is the key.

I did mention the enharmonic element in my post above as far as the D lever, and I may have been editing my post as you were typing your response. Ive also seen the 1st string G# raise lever often called a K lever as well.

Im still a new player myself, and it took a while before much of the disseminated jargon was sorted out. The E and F terms were just an example of how Mickey Adams uses them in his lessons, as that was an issue in Bill's previous post.

BTW, the term split has an altogether different meaning when used in reference to a string which is both raised and lowered where the combination is also tunable, aka split tuning.

Learning pedal steel can sometimes be like a math teacher saying, "2+2=4 and 2X2=4, now you go figure out how arithmetic works!"

Personally I like the approach of saying "5th fret, hit the A pedal and raise the Es" instead of "5th fret, hit the A Pedal and F lever."
Kinda like how Herb Steiner indicates levers in his tab by sharps and flats instead of letters. It doesn't matter where you have the lever that raises the Es, or whether you call it "F", "E" or "Bob". You know where it is on your guitar.

Vagueness about which lever does what makes tablature challenging. On top of which I'm left handed, and so is my PSG, so everything is wrong all the time

John Sadler wrote:Vagueness about which lever does what makes tablature challenging. On top of which I'm left handed, and so is my PSG, so everything is wrong all the time

Here's one approach, helpful for everything but the E strings (and there you can use a bit of logic): When you see a mark next to a string on the tab, remember that you likely only have one knee on each string. Just remember which levers work on which string. For the E strings, try remembering what chords are behind each bit you're playing, and that (for instance) on the third fret you'll raise the Es if they're on E (or as a passing tone in A or B), and lower them if they're on D (or G or possibly A)

Well, I'm just a beginner and I don't know how copedence or whatever is on other guitars, but on mine to press the B pedal and shift the 2nd knee lever produces a beautiful V7th chord that resolves beautifully into the I chord without moving the bar. Veteran players will know what I mean. I'm still struggling with terminology here...as you can tell.

Or say you're playing a v chord AB pedal down and want to go to a V7.....slide down two frets, press only the B pedal and shift the 2nd knee lever.....really nice effect!.......

What you call "The second lever" we call the E# lowers, and there's no agreement whether that's the E or D lever. Which is why I think it's a bad idea to give them letter designations, because not everyone designates alike.

I guess I'm strange, but I've been playing pedal steel since 1976 and I still can't say for sure without looking which pedal works which string. The "F" levers on my left knee no problem, they work the two E strings up and down. As for the others I always have to look.

They are both "E" levers because they both raise or lower the "E" strings

Yep, I know. I just always called them "F" levers. I'm not sure why.

When playing the levers and pedals are automatic, I don't think about them or what they do.

It was my understanding that the evolution of the pedal steel seems to begin with the ABC pedals. The levers were named to simply follow the alphabet. There are other versions of how the steel evolved from there, but my take on it is that the levers were named as they were implemented in alphabetical order. The first knee lever lowered the E strings, so that is why calling it the D lever makes sense. The next lever that came along was the one that raises the E strings so it was called the E lever. The next one lowered D# and is called the F lever. The next lever has a little more ambiguity because it could be used to raise strings 1 and 7 or lower string 6 and possibly raise other strings. But it is commonly referred to as the G lever because of the order in which it became implemented. Now days steels can have 8 levers or so and it becomes a mess to try and explain. I suppose if you're good enough to have 8 knee levers, you don't need learning material or tab anymore.