The Steel Guitar Forum

Hello All
I got GFI ULTRA steel that i love.
well, i playing like 18 months in the instrument, i dont know if this problem accured in the beginning, maybe my ears was not trained enough, but now its getting very annoying and almost impossible to record.
I think the problem comes from this simple reason:
when i press the A pedal, ALL the strings but 5 , 10, getting lowerd almost 1/4 tone lower.
it just sound horrible, especially in the higher frets with the 4 string !

what to do?

That would be the infamous "cabinet drop" effect that you will read about often on this forum. It is inherent to most steel guitars, except for maybe some of the Very high-end brands.

What kind of tuner are you using? If it can offset notes by "cents", then I can send you my personal offsets that I use on my Ultra. You should then be happy with what you hear.

It is not impossible to get it worthy of recording, but to my knowledge there is no way to tune a pedal steel so that every note in every combination of pedals and levers will be in perfect pitch at every exact fret location. There are compromises in the actual tuning itself, and in fret placement and bar technique after tuning is done.

Try doing a search on the forum for tuning. This topic has been exhaustively researched and discussed in many postings, several of them fairly recently. You wil discover that players have a variety of opinions on the correct procedure and how the result effects the way they hear their instrument. GFI probably recommends a "correct" procedure that is meant to get your guitar in the ballpark.

Jeff Harbour wrote:That would be the infamous "cabinet drop" effect that you will read about often on this forum. It is inherent to most steel guitars, except for maybe some of the Very high-end brands.

What kind of tuner are you using? If it can offset notes by "cents", then I can send you my personal offsets that I use on my Ultra. You should then be happy with what you hear.

I got a tuner in my phone with cents.
ill be happy.

Thank you all!

Ben, email sent...

I would also add - if you have a heavy foot and are smashing the pedals hard, you could be stressing things. I knew a steeler many years ago that had a tendency to do this. He played an old Sho-Bud that was in bad shape, the action was stiff, and he would really "heavy foot" it.

On a newer steel, with nylon stops, etc., it is possible to flex things a bit past the travel. Not saying this is your situation, but just throwing it out there...

Cabinet drop on string 4 is usually in the range of 3-6 cents, not a quarter tone (50 cents). If it's detuning that much, there could be a crack in the body. Or maybe the changer isn't firmly bolted down.

Most steel players tune the open E and B strings a few cents sharp, so that with A+B the E's drop that amount to be in tune with the pedaled A 440 note.

You may have perfect pitch ear and not be aware of it. If so you were born with it and have to learn to live with it.
I was born with it and started on piano when I was ten years old or so. I never learned about perfect pitch until years later .It about drove me up the wall until I was tested and found I was born with it and nothing sounds in perfect tune in every key, which it isn"t. Tracy

What B0b said... a few cents is normal cabinet drop. But 50 cents? A "1/4 of a whole-tone," as you said, or half a fret? On all strings? That indicates there's something unusual going on. You can't tune around that or use your ear to get some tricky bar placement.

Try loosening tension on the strings and then tightening the bolts on both end caps, the keyhead, and all changer bolts.

Has the guitar been transported assembled?
That's my bet.
ALWAYS either case it or brace it so NOTHING can move (as in strap it to the seats at top and bottom.
Get out your screwdriver and snug up every screw holding the guitar together.

Here are the Newman tuning charts In "cents" thanks to bOb:

https://steelguitarforum.com/b0b/jefftune.html

The original post:
http://bb.steelguitarforum.com/viewtopi ... ac9ff1c663

Before I retired, I started tuning all my strings that the A & B petals did not pull, to 440 with the
A & B petals pushed down. Then I tuned my B strings to 439.5 and the G strings to 437. I'm sure different steels and different steel pickers are always going to be different. You may need to just experiment. For a long time I used Jeff Newman's way. I know one top notch picker that tunes 440 across the board with no petals down, and he records a lot.

One important note...

If you have Grover tuning keys that are loose, DO NOT overtighten the nut!!! The key mechanism will break, I found out the hard way.

Luckily a new 10-pack of them is fairly inexpensive and easy to find. But, it wasn't fun having to wait on the shipment.

Get a Peterson Strobo Pus HD Tuner. Tune all your strings open first and then tune pedals and knees. If you use the Peterson and still having problems, you have something loose or moving under the guitar. I tune my "E",s in 440.
I use the 0E9 for open and the 0P9 for the pedals and knees. Been using this same exact tuning now for 35 years.

maybe your strings are not wrapped properly at the post. This is a common problem for guitars that go out of tune.

20 cents or more due to body drop is crazy ! Thats a defect not an issue.

More like 2 or 3 cents, maybe , and only on a couple of strings. MAYBE.

Look somewhere else for the problem.

IF GFI guitars experienced this kind of issue there would BE NO GFI Guitars, they would be out of business.

But, they are not.

Georg Sørtun wrote: And, yes, that particular GFI was clearly damaged ... probably because its owner had tried to tune it to anything but regular E9 pedaling and overstressed parts in the process.

Interesting, what parts were over-stressed which became damaged ?

In order to make music be equally out-of-tune in every key (some were getting lonely, ignored, unwanted ) some of the "offsets" required can be like 11, 13 cents. Not from one note to the next, but certain regular, common intervals. Not even like commie flat 2nds and Satan's b5, but plain old peanut butter'n jelly notes like 3rds and 6ths and Maj 7's. I used to like intervals... I thot they were my FRENNS...

When your ear is trained up fine from lots of playing, you can detect an offset as little as 3 to 4 cents. I've come to think I do or would have Perfect Pitch if I set myself for it, but the FIRST thing I learned after a LOT of drone matching, playing harmony notes off different intervals etc. was:

A lotta my favorite music is really, really way-the-frick out-of-tune.

Miles Davis once had the odd idea that ANY note could be a "blue note" if you approached well and built it a nice little "concept cottage" to hang out in. Unfortunately, he had THAT idea right while recording "Sketches of Spain"... good lord, have you ever LISTENENENENED to that thing?

I used to like "Sketches of Spain."

Good observations, Dave.

Nit picking the sub-topic a little further, perfect pitch is the ability to identify a note (or frequency) the instant it is played. Relative pitch is the ability to identify a note after a reference tone is established. If you can tune your instrument by ear to an accurate reference tone, or can tell when it is out of tune, you have relative pitch.

It is possible that some people are more sensitive to variations in relative pitch than others. I know many non-musicians who can tell when something is "off". I have never met anyone who can identify a note as C sharp or D flat at its perfectly accurate frequency, though I am sure there are people who suffer this disorder. I know lots of people who can say a song sounds like it is in the key of whatever, myself included.

Are pedal steels made to be perfectly in tune? I think the point has been made here that the physics of the instrument prevents that, and certain intervals sound bad if they are tuned "perfectly" anyway. We tune up with relative pitch and try to make it sound good when we play, period. You want a steel guitar to sound like computer music?

Does your guitar have rollers at the keyhead? A lot of GFI's do not. you may put some dry lube on the cross bar. This may help with return tune coming back up

Hi Ben,

You wrote that “when I press the A pedal, ALL the strings but 5, 10, getting lowered almost 1/4 tone lower”. As others have said, a quartertone flat is quite a drop.
With all due respect, is it possible that you are misreading your electronic tuner?

A semitone below A(440 hz) is G#(415 hz), so a quartertone is half of 25 hz (12.5 hz) which would be 427.5 hz.
Since 1 hertz is equal to 4 cents, 12.5 hz = 50 cents, so either way you look at it, a quartertone flat would be at "-50 cents"--the very bottom of the cents scale of a tuner like this one...

Can you check to see how many cents flat the flattest note is when you step on the A pedal?

- Dave