The Steel Guitar Forum

Most of us know more about the under carriage of a pedal steel guitar than we know about composition or harmonization skills, analytical skills, aural skills and activities that involve part writing, improvisation, music analysis, sight singing and playing, articulation.
Take off a little time of from practice and learn the language of music
If for nothing more than the pure enjoyment of it.

It is just so enjoyable when Stuart ( Stuart Legg , you know the one that is loved by all here on the Forum) and I work together on music projects that without the music knowledge we would not even consider tackling.
Much of which we share here is soundly trashed at first but over time seems to slowly grow on folks like an ugly wart.

Hey Bo. do you remember this project.
click here

I don't get bogged down in the mechanics at the expense of the music, but the PSG is an instrument where you need a little engineering sense to get the best out of it, more so than say the fiddle or the trumpet.

I just assume that abundance of mechanical engineering chatter on the forum is always about a means to a musical end, like Ian just said, although that musical end is often left to the reader as a mystery to solve on his own. Part of the fun.

The forum’s Music section can sometimes be a happy place for the theory and composition nerd, like me. As far as “taking time off from practice” to study some musical concept or nuther, that’s been part of my practice time for so long I don’t know any other way to do it. But, “to know and not do is to not truly know”, so I try to make study time be in the service of something I’m actually going to play.

I enjoyed Stuart’s compositional rule for the m7+M6 chord tone scale. I have played guitar solos using melodic notes from a diatonic scale mode, but every diatonic note had to be followed by it’s b5. Those were some ugly solos...

Stuart and I started out with colliding the minor penta and the major penta and then by racking through the ruble we we found only remains of 2 arpeggios.
As we crunched the numbers we wound up dropping the 2nd from the major penta and the 4th from the minor penta leaving minor7 and major 6 arpeggios as a result.
We then discovered in order to make the scale sound major we had to directly resolve the minor7 to the major6 and the rest is history

I really designed the scale for the elderly steel player.

Disclaimer: Elderly may experience brain freeze up and mental shut down due to the dizzy back and forth motion of this scale.
Could make you forget where you hid your Viagra!

a few years back this would have been a fun topic with drive by bash-ers and some folks who would actually try the scale and then make fun off it but no, no no no we gotta stick with anal attentive!

The "mechanics" of it is where everything starts. I've often heard the phrase "Music is nothing but arithmetic." But without some sort of mechanical science involved, there is no sound, and therefore no music.

Maybe that's why so many of us are are into the mechanics of the instrument.

Without mechanics music is not possible. It is just theory, numbers, and alphabet soup.

Even the human voice requires the mechanics of pressure from the diaphram,, and vibrations from vocal cords.

Pedal steel is so beautifully expressive because of the mechanics afforded us by this beautiful instrument.

This hybrid approach to scales is a very common approach used by lots of jazz players. Hexatonic scales are super great and the hybrid approach can be used to create endless colors for improvisation.

Great comment Nick. We can depend on you to cut to the heart of the matter on theory. Also on how to make great pickups!