The Steel Guitar Forum

Iʻm building a bag of licks for Hawaiian steel guitar to improve my ability to improvise. I made a web site that can be used for practicing them. Here’s the link:

https://mikebonnice.com/tenversatilevamps.html

This is sort of a trial, the site needs more features, but for now it’s enough to help with practice.

I collected many vamps (close to 50) and chose a subset of 10 that sound good most of the time. They seem pretty versatile because they can be played with two-chord vamps or three-chord vamps. Any of the 10 could have variations, so they are like representatives of their own families. You can decide which licks are appropriate for which mele according to musical taste.

For each lick, you will see the tab notation on steel guitar and the score notation. Each is in five musical keys (A, C, D, F and G).

Each also has a recording of me playing the lick over a rhythm track. Each is also played within the context of a song. This helps train the ear to know when to play the lick. There’s no guarantee that I play well, that’s the point of the practice 😉

When you get to that site youʻll find a link to my email address. If you have questions or ideas for improvements, please let me know.

Me ka haʻahaʻa,

Mike

Cool idea, Mike! I can see this as being very helpful in practice. Really all you need is the examples and the music and tab. There are so many turnarounds and vamps in Hawaiian music, but they are so important. Thanks for posting this, Mike! I will make use of it.

Very cool Mike, thanks a lot!

I'm having a lot of fun with these as well, many thanks!

Hello Mike. I just received an 8 string Morrell in the mail today and plan on digging into some of your licks as soon as I get it set up. I created an app specifically for creating fretboard roadmaps on my 6 and 8 string lap steels. If you check out some of my webcams you might find it useful. Any suggestions as to which 8 string tuning would be best for blues/jazz/R&B? I'd like one that makes it easy to navigate the old II-V-I.

https://www.69thstreetband.com/chord-an ... inder.html

Tom, your fretboard app is slick. I spent years doing that manually in Microsoft Excel. I used it to learn my way around the C6 tuning on 6 string lap steel, then extended it to C6 with 8 string. In Excel Iʻd have to shade the cells, print the file, make my markups. Now I have notebooks of printed pages (which I donʻt refer to any more).

Then, I tried the B13 tuning, so I constructed it in Excel again. Itʻs painful and error prone. Your app would have saved me some effort. I might use it when it comes out on Apple because Iʻm still not really savvy on B13.

I like the C6 tuning for single note work, Iʻve memorized where the chords are and can improvise somewhat. Iʻm starting to like the B13 when I want big fat chords with a lot of versatility. However, I donʻt know licks and vamps in the B13 tuning yet.

My B13 is this (from low to high) B-C#-D#-F#-A-C#-E-G#. With a straight bar I can get these chords:
Major, minor, 7, 9, 11, 13, 6, m7, sus4, sus2, 6/9, +9, M7, dim


Of course, some of these chords are partial. However, I always play with a band, Iʻm not a soloist. So, I can count on the bass player or guitar or ukulele to be laying down the rhythm structure, I donʻt need to play every note of a chord.

Good stuff. Thanks!