The Steel Guitar Forum

Think I saw a blue-ish one with more levers once, at the St Louis Convention not that long ago. Didnt think it sold to anyone.

Hope someone has more pics and info.

If my memory serves me correctly, I believe that Japanese steel player Lion Kobayashi had and played one of those.....

looking

Howard R, you are right. I've seen Lion play this style instrument and recall it had six changers. It seems like a pretty good system.l

Interesting instrument. Were the levers designed to be used like pedals for on-the-fly pitch shifting, or to be used to change to different tunings?

The changers shift the tuning. I haven't seen them used like modern pedal guitars, but a good player can smoothly use different tunings in a solo or individual phrases.

I remember it. Excel had it on their website at one time and now all I see is that one archive photo. I don't know if they would still make one or not as I don't see it listed among their "products". As others have said, it was a Lion Kobayashi model (whether officially so or not?)

.....looking

....still trying to locate one of these

basically when fender came out with pedal guitars they were touted as changing tunings. the original literature with the guitars showed the different tunings you could change to by pressing down on a pedal.

if you cant find one of these, you could set a pedal guitar up to do this. instead of tuning to E9, you can tune to another tuning and have each pedal change strings to another tuning.

you might even be able to make some "shift" levers to work with a pedal guitar.

hope you can find one, but if not, you could mod a pedal guitar.

Thanks for the idea.

I experimented with modding a pedal guitar, "easy" since all the equipment is installed. Some of the tunings required 2 pedals and 2 knee levers (there arent enough changer holes and probably not enough leverage for each tuning to have its own pedal). But it gets tiresome holding any the whole time without a lockout. plus you cant stand up and play it. Furthermore, it would have to be a 12 string uni to be as elegant lightweight and compact as this Excel 8 string because you need more than 3 pedals. Ill share my research with anyone interested.

Try this and see if you agree: You can get a decent B11 'hawaaian' tuning on any E9 guitar:

tune string 4 up a half to F
Hold A and B (emmons)
LKR (lower strings 4 and 8 )
if equipped, RKR to lower string 9 a half. (or detune 9)

In this example there would be 7 changes on one pedal....

Not entirely sure how this excel was set up nor what the string gauges are....another challenge is to find a common denominator.

Still seeking THIS or the blue guitar like it. tnx