The Steel Guitar Forum

I am a steel player and now have a below knee amputation on my left leg and foot. Does anyone else have this situation? Are there ways to work the pedals for either neck? I have a prosthetic leg and foot.
Thanks

Place this in the right section, Steel Players, and you might get more viewings. Not everyone reads this sction.

Some makers (I think Fred Justice and Bill Rudolph do it) will move the "knee levers" to a "cage" surrounding the picking hand.
And you can have the pedals moved over to the right end of the guitar, and get a Telonics volume cap (affixing inclinometers to the bill of a cap to control the volume)

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I had a single neck C6th for a while, and had the pedals moved down a ways for two-footery. You do need to figure out how much and where you need the volume control if you want to play "classic" E9th stuff, because some of that involves HOLDING pedals down, your foot can't, like, LEAVE to go stomp something else. But if you look at a pedal steel, the bottom bar holding the pedals is usually drilled out for the positions available anyway, and they're drilled all the way across. Or looking at a fully-loaded D10 or D12 - with 10 or 12 pedals, they go ALL the way over to the right. You could talk to your doctor, maybe even poke around a bit then contact/write to the manufacturers of the prosthetics - they enjoy the challenge of things like this! Gene Fields of GFI steel guitars and Jerry Fessenden (Fessenden) are known here as two builders who can and have hooked up... anything, to everything. You've landed in a good spot here; the percentage of multi-instrument guys who's hinky hands are driving them more and more towards steel as we age is quite large (100%, in my household! ).

I just googled "pedal steel guitar wrist levers" and found what I remembered (other stuff there too):



It's a GFI with a box arrangement of right wrist levers controlling FOUR different bends; as there are ALSO licks that <strike>demand</strike> request multiple levers at the same time, there's a... umm... well, if your mind needs a good boggling now and then this is the right place too!

(Edit: I just actually READ Mr. Gray's post; Fred Justice makes "Justice" steels, Bill Rudolph makes "Williams", so there's four... but making strings tighter or looser in response to pedals is pretty much what pedal steels DO, and an experienced steel repair & maintenence guy may be able to revamp an existing instrument for what you need.)

On the GFI with that arrangement, it's easy to use two of the wrist levers at once, such as pushing up and left for the a/b change, and up and right for the b/c change (on the one I played with at Gene's house anyway).

Go all the way to lap steel and have a palm pedal from Duesenerg or others installed. Check out Luke Goetze on youtube for a January '16 and February '16 offering.