The Steel Guitar Forum

So..
I'm an old band director and I know a few things about
practice BUT.. new to the steel..

What methods or madness do you all use to practice?

I bought the Winnie Winston Steel Guitar book to start with , and worked my way through it .

If I were just starting I would get the Paul Franklin Foundation course.
https://www.modernmusicmasters.com/paul ... oundations

What I do going on 5 years in now, on a day when I sit down to some serious practice:
-About an hour with Joe Wright’s “My Approach” book, split between RH & LH exercises
-Maybe 10 minutes of pedal and lever exercise, plus tuning check
-Another hour working with Ted Greene’s single-note jazz books
-Whatever time I have left playing tunes I thought I knew (including bits from that Winnie book)
-If I am learning a new song, sometimes the whole 3 hours might be devoted to little exercises within the piece, just to get the inside out of how and where I want to play it.

Within each of those chunks is a certain amount of time management. I don’t obsess over it, though. Just enough to keep from overdoing stuff and risking hand injury or back pain. Taking breaks also allows time to re-focus.

That’s about it. Wish I could do it every day. But, you know, life...

You likely have a keen ear if you're a band director. After you get the basics down you can also pick out licks, intros and endings from CD's and work at duplicating them. There's also a lot of good instruction and dissection on the Tab page of the Forum.

Check out this post and the whole blog: The Eternal Beginner

What I do first is understand clearly what I want to learn.

For me it is E9, C6 and non-pedal Steel.

Then I get tab of of tunes and licks, not of modern steel players but of the folks modern steel players learned from. I start first by learning the concepts that turned the steel sound into what it is today.

I work on technique. There is a little tab written with this in mind. One I like a lot are some technique improvement right hand exercises that William Litaker put together and have found those to be quite helpful.

Find flaws and fix them.

The Winston book is a great compendium of knowledge, but it's not a course of instruction - it gets too hard too soon. Buy it, but look elsewhere for progressive basics.

Hi Virgil,

I am a former band director myself, I now teach music education classes at the university level. I started playing steel a little over a year ago, and have worked into a sort of daily practice regimen. I work on my right hand for about an hour a day, working scales and blocking exercises, as well as some challenging classic licks and rides to develop my technique. I try to so some transcribing every day, listening to my favorite steel players and figuring things out by ear (I always write it out in tab, with the rhythm notated above). I also like to practice ear-playing on the fly by putting my iTunes library on shuffle and just playing along with tunes. I bought a bunch of books early on, but hardly used any of them. Once I figured out the basic mechanics of the instrument and typical pockets, string groupings, etc. it became easier to learn new licks and tunes quickly.

I bought a few lesson books and tab along the way, but didn't use most of it. After you learn the neck and pedal/knee combinations you can quickly pick up on what you hear from a recording and dissect it and find it on your guitar. The timbre of the strings can narrow down where on the neck and which strings the lick, intro, ride, ending is being played. Ear training and experience will eventually prevail.

Jeff Newman's up from the top series and his minor chord connection are very good books and the DVD's are very good one on one teaching along with the cd sound tracks you can play along. Also Joe Wright's my approach can take on to the next level. With your music back ground you should advance very quick. The key is you, how serious you are about learning and how much time are you willing to spend practicing. Learn the neck open and all pedals and levers this knowledge will help greatly. Jeff's teaching series are an excellent source to learn this. Now this is just things I have found that helped me.

Itzhak Perlman , the violinist , advises practicing one hour of scales , one hour of etudes , and an hour of repertoire . That's about two hours more than I do daily .

J Fletcher wrote:Itzhak Perlman , the violinist , advises practicing one hour of scales , one hour of etudes , and an hour of repertoire . That's about two hours more than I do daily .

Hey, that sounds familiar on all 4 counts.