The Steel Guitar Forum

As we all know, Mooney's playing is unmistakable in a recording, for me especially in the Waylon era. I finally saw a copedent chart for him on another thread and was taken aback. I'm curious as to what his point of reference, or I guess what informed his choices for his changes. Anybody have some history?

From what I can gather, he started off with the basic Nashville pedal setup (A&B changes, later adding the C pedal), and then simply went from two string pulls to single string pulls. He played pretty much like the Nashville players to start with (check out his stuff with Wynn Stewart). Later, he changed his style and approach, splitting down the pulls so he could do more single-string work, and moving harmonies with the open strings. My guess is he just wanted to differentiate his sound from the typical Nashville player, and didn't care for the re-entrant (chromatic) tuning.