Inspiration from other instruments

[Andrew Goulet]

What instruments besides steel influence and inspire your pedal steel guitar playing?

I'm sure many will say horns or voice, which makes a lot of sense.

I was thinking about this because I really enjoy piano, although I don't play a lick of it myself. However, I hear some really inventive or effective stride or jazz/blues piano licks and think, "Wow I'd really like to transpose that to steel and then steal/steel it".

[Skip Edwards]

I remember hearing Buddy Emmons say that he listened to clarinet players and their single note runs...saying something to the effect that those suckers play really fast.

[Karl Paulsen]

I know my 30 years as a bass (upright then electric) player influences my playing quite a bit and in my casual trio a lot of what I do happens in what I think is a lead guitar space and role though I've never been a lead guitar player before.

I tend to conciously think in terms of classical string instruments (especially cello and viola) and organ a lot. Not sure that it really translates through my novice playing, but those are my sonic touchstones in tone and often in role.

[Jerry Overstreet]

I never think about it in terms of instruments. If I hear a song I like, no matter what it is...vocal, instrumental...it's the melody that inspires me to try and cover it...and sometimes the lyric along with it.

[Ron Funk]

I've also heard that if you want to play fast, learn from clarinet music

Think of Pete Fountain - Wow!

[Lee Baucum]

I played percussion instruments in band from 7th grade through college. I hear rhythms in almost everything I listen to. I hear rhythms better than I hear lyrics.

Back in the 1970s I played in a band that played non-stop country shuffles and waltzes. I had just come out of quite a few years of playing guitar in a rock band and had never heard most of the songs we were playing. Instead of trying to play melodies when it was time for me to take a ride, I would mimic the rhythm of the melody, using different notes. It all fit and the rest of the band was happy with what I played.

[Ian Rae]

My first instrument is trombone, so when I came to steel guitar I had ear/slide coordination already in place and I've never had any problems playing in tune. I love the C6 tuning where I can play close harmony without having to find three other guys

In my current band I double on fretless bass, another slippery instrument!

[Bill C. Buntin]

Jazz guitarists in no particular order. But typically main stream jazz and hard bop.

[Chris Brooks]

One of my bands plays "jazz/fusion/Americana," so I try to provide support, for example, when the guitar is playing the lead. I play an S-12, so I have access to the bassier strings and think "pianistically" when I am in back-up mode. Using thumb and 3 fingers adds to the pianistic concept: I can get 4-note chords in various inversions.

Playing in the bass/baritone range also keeps me out of the guitar player's soloing range.

So for this kind of role, I am listening to what piano and vibes players do. But I'm still learning!

[Fred Treece]

Just about anything. Cellos, violins, flute, horn, voice, sections & choirs. Banjo and guitar, obviously. I like the percussion idea, since rhythm is the basic musical building block that I so often neglect in my own study.

Turning the question on its side, I wonder which instrumentalists (other than guitar) look to steel guitar for inspiration?

[Tucker Jackson]

A horn section from R&B and soul bands.

I'm weirdly on my second recording session where what fits best in the song is a 70's-style horn section doing mellow pads and the occasional accent stab. But I'm mimicking that on steel. It almost works.

[Lee Gauthier]

I only managed to track down a pedal steel guitar this year, but prior to that I am primarily a guitar/bass/synth player that's been somewhat obsessed with the gliss of the pedal steel. I have played lap steel on and off since I was a kid too but chasing counterpoint of pedal steel has lead me down some weird roads.

This is a pedal steel inspired synth interpretation of a Quartet for the end of time I performed on an electronic instrument called the soundplane: https://youtu.be/tETB9VFawnM

[Jim Saunders]

I grew up in Tulsa, home of Leon McCauliffe and I would go to the Cimmeron Ballroom to watch him do his radio show on Saturday mornings. I got hooked listening to him on his 3-neck Fender and the western swing band.

[Asa Brosius]

I've been working off an Oscar Peterson Trio live video of 'you look good to me'. It's daunting, features 0 steel guitar clichés, feels impossibly fast and clean, wildly inventive, so wrong for steel, in a perfect pocket, and at some point I realized I'm only learning his right hand parts and occasionally implying the left. It's been the best for ears and technique, and a nice break from playing Franklin parts or approximating Emmons clichés on the back neck.

[Chance Wilson]

Man you scared me. When I think of Oscar, I think of sweat and Barney and wouldn't generally attempt anything beyond admiring from afar.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdd5pn1xs7M

[Asa Brosius]

Yes, I'm scared too, as well as an admirer from afar. Climb a mountain step by step, abandon all hope of fruition, find the patterns, until you recognize you're maybe at least on the same planet as these players. Learning bits of Peterson reminds me of the first few months with a pedal steel- every new move felt impossible, stupid, a physical insult.

[Mark van Allen]

Back in the 70’s Buddy Emmons showed me some fingering exercises he did based on applying drum paradiddles to two right hand fingers. You can hear that in a lot of his phrasing.
As for me, I find a lot of inspiration from trombone players- phrasing, register, and tone all fit well with steel.
When I was working out things with the EH B-9 organ unit, I was impressed (again) with what we can swipe from keyboardists!

[Fred Treece]

Man you scared me. When I think of Oscar, I think of sweat and Barney and wouldn't generally attempt anything beyond admiring from afar.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdd5pn1xs7M

Holy crap!!!
Thank you for posting that link.

Somebody mentioned BE finding inspiration/awe from listening to clarinet players. When I saw John Jorgenson with his Gypsy Jazz Quintet, he played clarinet on 3 or 4 tunes. He was outstanding. It struck me that his phrasing on guitar was so similar.

Many forum members describe themselves as multi-instrumentalists, and I don’t mean just doubling on other strings. Keyboards, horns, woodwinds, percussion, harmonica - these all seem foreign to steel guitar, yet I am sure that there is a lot of carryover from one to the other, just because of the way a musician thinks about playing such different contraptions.

[Andrew Goulet]

Thank you, everyone for your responses! What an interesting thread!

I don't know anything about horns, but I'd love to know what intervals were in play in the Mar-Keys' music, for example.

Lee, I liked that performance with the soundplane, and I'd like to know what that large instrument to your left is.

Recently I've been playing alot of drums in a psych rock band and it's kicked my awareness of rhythm up to a whole new level. There's so little room for error when you're drumming!

[Lee Gauthier]

That instrument is a vibraphone with a bunch of motorized hammers attached. It can be seen in action in this performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeCjpVbXgBQ

[Lee Gauthier]

One source of inspiration I have from outside the plucked string world that I always find myself coming back to is Adam Rudolph's book Pure Rhythm https://metarecords.com/pure_rhythm.html. On guitar I've applied the concepts in the most obvious way by mapping the polyrhythms onto each of my fingers. Usually just a Travis picking style where the thumb gets one rhythm and the other 4 fingers get the other, but you could get really creative if you start tapping and breaking the rhythms up between both hands.

I haven't really attempted to bring any of that over to steel yet... gotta get that blocking way cleaner first.

[John Larson]

Not really an instrument per say more a sound.
I've always had a soft spot for eastern (byzantine/arabic/middle eastern) sounding scales and modes, as well as music with a heavy emphasis on drones (celtic folk music, indian ragas, gregorian and byzantine church chant, organum etc.)

[J D Sauser]

Studying Jazz/Bebop at the same time as going "deep" into C6th... I must say that I have moved away from listening much to PSG players with priority. I might listen to non-PSG-single note players rather than to PSG player.
But most of all I study piano players for chords and some improvisation (they tend to base a lot around of the technicalities, advantages and challenges of playing with or against the key-board layout and playing around different key centers (an issue we don't have, modulating is as easy as dragging the whole mess up or down with the nudge of a bar). I can't seem to derive as much from guitar players as it is often difficult to see what or where exactly they play and they face very different fingering challenges than we do and can't play out chords they way we can. But they DO tend to rather play around chord arpeggios (which seems the most natural approach for a chord-tuned instrument like the steel) than other instruments which derive their improvisation more off scales and eventually modes.
Yet I must admit that for single notes clarinet and SOME sax players have a vocabulary which seems to translate well onto steel.
Trumpets etc. seem to be other hard to play instruments and you can hear the players battling "limits" all the time, especially in Jazz, Bebop and Classical music. They have it extremely difficult to play instrument in "odd" keys. They have to think "sharps" & "flats" to the point that it's almost like learning the instrument's "tuning" (the valve system") 12 times over. I feel that, because we don't have the main issues they face, Trumpets are somewhat complicated to learn off. And to make matters worse, unless you are a well versed trumpet player yourself, you can't "see" what they play, you only can listen. And they will most likely play "different" in some keys as some are more difficult than others. Why take over "problems" we don't have?

All that being said, the vast majority of my you-tube downloads are keyboard-tutorials or tutorials using a keyboard for demonstration of certain approaches. The keyboard is uniquely graphic and easily visible and it is very "linear"... notes go up or down in one or the other direction and there is only ONE key to produce any each particular tone. Intervals are very visible. I've come so far to have a little keyboard next to me for study. And it's helped me tremendously and there is just a wealth of quality and in depth information available for or on keys.

I think that too many steel players tend to listen to too much steel guitar. I have been guilty of that myself in the past. I doesn't benefit the player nor the development or future of the instrument. When we only listen to steel, we tend to just copy, imitate and repeat.
I suspect that many more of the greats and specially those who took the instrument into another direction or another step up, during it's early history, where indeed listening to a lot of other instruments. BE is a well documented example. I know that Doug Jernigan "took" stuff from Jazz Guitar greats and Maurice Anderson actually took lessons from Jazz Guitar Great Barney Kessel at some time. I believe that PF discloses in his current online course that he too took lessons with non-steel Jazz Greats.

I am taking occasional lessons with my son's Jazz piano teacher (a very open minded Conservatory scholar). He knew nothing of steel guitar and it's "interesting" because he throws stuff at me without regard of the mechanical possibilities and limitations of my PSG. And that's god while it has proven a challenge but also generated some unexpected results and successes for me.

Evidently, Country E9th steel guitar is a musical idiom or "dialect" by itself. So, unless one would be looking to change the musical impact of steel in Country completely, learning steel off piano or most any other instrument, would seem the contrary of a short-cut?


... J-D.

[Steve Sycamore]

Though pulling phrases from both classical and Jazz (especially Bebop) is inspirational, strangely the most pedal steel friendly runs can come from synthesizer or organ phrases.

The progressive rock classic Karn Evil 9 - First Impression by Emerson, Lake and Palmer is especially full of those kinds of phrases and is, of course, rather high energy in feel and conception.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLS0Med0s6E

[Fred Treece]

Ha, I remember that ELP LP from the days of my misguided youth. High energy is an understatement! Those guys were brilliant, but man...what was in their morning coffee? I don’t think I could pull anything from that piece to play on steel if my life depended on it.