The Steel Guitar Forum

I am looking for a pedal to give a tone in the vein of Duane Allman and Derek Trucks. Some sessions I have done recently called for a slide tone but the chords etc available on on E9. Thanks in advance!

I have tried and tried to get a good Cooder slide tone on pedal steel. Not that easy. My best results have been with an old, original Rat pedal.

Lighter bar. If they want some of that bar drag/fret buzz, use a sitar bar just off the flat

Lane,
I tried that, and it just didn't get that sound.I want a fat, round sound, and it's difficult to get with the tight strings on a pedal steel.
JB

A lot depends on whether you are really trying to clone that particular sound or if you are looking for good 'acceptable' tone. Cloning will mean a long and expensive quest because there are SO MANY options out there. I spent a lot of hours with a PodXT (because of how tweakable it is) seeing if I could get close to Duane's sound. Answer: no, not really. But the right combination of amp model, drive, and OD simulation got me in the right mood.
Remember that both those cats get/got their signature sound the old fashioned way. Guitar. Tube amp.

A good genre of pedal is the Dumble type ODs such as the Simble and the ZenDrive. They are nicely musical. If you are looking for good sound rather than specifically Duane/Derek sound, it is a good direction.

And of course, so much is in the playing technique.

Olli does a beautiful demo of the Simble here:

http://bb.steelguitarforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=269493

I've never played one. I have a Zen Drive which can do this sort of thing too.

Well,
Lapsteel is very different from pedal steel. Here's me playing with Neil Zaza. Monkey Ward Rocket, through a tube amp.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAY1WKouT18
You can get that sound with a lapsteel, but it's much harder with a pedal steel. I really think that string tension has something to do with it.

I've found a glass bar to be helpful. I'm using these: http://www.diamondbottlenecks.com/Main.html
As far as the od goes...the closest thing to real tube amp breakup I've found is the Klon. A dimed champ, or better yet Princeton, is pretty sweet.

Here's the sound I'm looking for. Ain't heard it yet on pedal steel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-e0XvZHYGA

Will Van Horn wrote:I've found a glass bar to be helpful. I'm using these: http://www.diamondbottlenecks.com/Main.html
As far as the od goes...the closest thing to real tube amp breakup I've found is the Klon. A dimed champ, or better yet Princeton, is pretty sweet.

yep, that was gonna be my suggestion too.
glass bar... cuts down the excess sustain relative to slide guitar.

j

Set your volume pedal about halfway and take your foot off of it. Use a glass bar. That gets you most of the way there. The rest is using the right amp.

I would say the things missing normally with a steel rig for things like this is the compression and sag of an overdriven amp, the difference in attack with thumb and finger picks to a standard pick or Dereks bare hands, and pickup placement/lack of neck pickup on a steel. You're going to have to play less like a pedal steel player with the bar too as those guys aren't leaving their slide stationary and swelling into notes. It's 100% on the volume knob and controlling everything with their hands.

John Billings wrote:Here's the sound I'm looking for. Ain't heard it yet on pedal steel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-e0XvZHYGA

ok, a bunch if caveats here.
firstly, it's Ry f*ing Cooder, and it's not like it's an easy tone to achieve on bottleneck, either.
it sounds like he's using a string-through pickup here, and there isn't really anything like that available for pedal steel, sadly... to me, it sounds like he's utalizing the string clipping on the pole pieces too, which is a cool and unique part of those pickups.
also, there's awesome sag in that clip, which seems to be a really difficult/impossible thing to get out of a effects box...

but, all that being said, here's my take on that vibe.
tiny glass bar, no volume pedal, no finger picks, lots of palm muting, overdrive box, nothing special amp-wise.
it's nowhere near as cool as that, but it's something.

http://youtu.be/GN4Oh5VBeWs

re: OP, i think if you're looking for a Derek Trucks kinda sound, you'll be wanting a neck pickup on your steel. i know i want one!!

j

It helps to have a tone control on the steel so you can roll off the highs before they hit the dirt box.

I like the Earth Drive for a pushed amp sound.

What I do to sound like a slide guitar is only play on the E and B strings and forget the pedals.

dirty tone is dirty tone. there are a million pedals to use for it.
it's what you do with it that is more important.

The Duane Allman/Derek Trucks sound that the OP Cody Angel requested is very different from the distorted Ry Cooder sound that John Billings posted. And that's not even typical Cooder tone - it's just something he used on one cut. Sounds like a very small tube amp to me - not something that anyone would use very often.

Another aspect of the bluesy slide guitar sound is lifting the bar instead of palm blocking. The bar kiss noise on attacks and releases is subtle, but it also makes you play differently. It loosens you up.

Slide guitarists use wider vibrato than most steel players. Watch them! You'll often see a vibrato range of nearly a full fret above and below. That would be considered extreme on any country pedal steel track.

b0b'
RC uses that tone, or similar, quite a bit! Sometimes he uses big amps, often small ones. I remember seeing Little Village on The Tonight Show. Ry had a six-foot toll rack of effects, and on top of it was an ancient little Alamo amp! 8^). Just for fun, here's a great tune by Little Village;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xI37YTIOV4E

Here's something with his more common electric slide tone, very fat!;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Jx5R9qWK4Y

Some of Cooder's tone I like. Some I really don't. That first clip falls under the latter. He suffered from the 80's too.

To me, neither of those sound like the "All Shook Up" track you originally posted, John. It's almost a kazoo sound, not your typical Ry Cooder.

Yeah b0b, I kinda agree. But RC uses a lot of different and subtly different sounds for his guitars.
I still think that string tension may have something to do with the difficulty getting good "bottleneck" sounds from a pedal steel. Pedal strings are so tight compared to strings in Low Bass G or D tuning on a 6-string. And, of course as mentioned, the position of a steel's pickup so close to the "bridge."

luckily i'm not that good or that picky, i guess.
i found an ibanez fat cat long ago that covers my overdrive/distortion stuff just the way i like it.
it seems that , to me, alot of you spend alot of time and money overthinking something that will never be as important as your performance.
lots of pedals will get you close, but what you play with them is what people will remember.
you can take a six foot high rack to the gig if you want, but i'll take a 2 inch tall pedal.

Chris,
"you can take a six foot high rack to the gig if you want,"
It was Ry playing a joke!. I miss my old original Rat pedal! Never should have traded it to James! I still think the high tension of steel strings is part of the problem of getting a good bottleneck sound on steel. And E9th doesn't give you the low "power" strings for Delta Blues. maybe it can be done in C6th?
JB

oh he was just using it for an amp stand for the alamo?
that's funny!