The Steel Guitar Forum

I am building a guitar that takes its design cues from the 50's "White" student lap steel I have on the forum HERE But be will adding three pedals that pull only and six strings. I have looked at many ways to tune but think I will go with C6- C E G A C E and use three pulls to move the low E to F, the G to A and the A to Bâ™­. If you would like to make some other suggestions I could use more experienced information.

I feel like I have made sort sort of forum faux pas, maybe a photo will help. The guitar so far.

That sounds about right- you are using the old Fender design on the changer.

Yes I did look at the Fender mechanism but mine only raise pitch, I may tackle something a bit more complicated next time. There is quite a bit to think about and make to get something simple like this one working.

Regarding tuning, what styles of music are you interested in playing?

Okay, anything that has been getting me used to the guitar as slide is new to me. Have been looking at available stuff on the net like Sleepwalk, Aloha Oe etc. Western Swing seems a great place to start with this instrument and I love that zappy 1 4 5 stuff. I have looked at what looks like better blues tunings but then then can't find a way to help them out with a few pitch raising levers.

I think my requirements were slightly different from yours in that I'm primarily a lap player (A6) playing old time country and western swing but I wanted to get some traditional E9 pedal licks.

I bought a 6 shooter (2 pedals and I added a knee lever sp all single raise only). I went for the middle 6 strings of E9 with B to C#, G# to A (the standard A&B pedals) and an E to F raise on the knee lever.

But before I did that, I tuned it (high to low) E B G# F# E B but with the A&B pedals I had my standard A6 tuning (E C# A F# E C#). So I did a lot of playing in my default tuning - A6 - with pedals down.

So what I am suggesting is maybe instead of thinking of yours as a C6 tuning and working out what strings to to raise, you could come at it from the opposite direction and work on a G tuning which becomes your C6 when you press the pedals.

I'm pretty sure that the early pedal steel tunings - back when raises were the only option - were played a lot of the time with "pedals down" as the default position.

Cheers Jeff, clever and helpful cause I would not have thought in that direction. More options to consider.