The Steel Guitar Forum

More for curiosity and out of 'too-cold outside' boredom, I wondered how well the Emmons C6 Strobostomp No-Pedal sweetener would transfer from pedal steel to lap steel.

Turns out, in my case pretty nicely. I like the pedal steel sweetened tuning very much on my lap steel.

Until this exercise, I tuned the lap steel ACEGACEG to standard and then tweaked a couple strings until they felt right to my ear. Not too formal or always consistent.

I tuned the lap steel with the Strobostomp EmmonsC6 sweetener and then checked the tuning variance with a standard needle tuner. This is what I got over standard tuning:

A (-17)
C (0)
E (-10)
G (0)
A (-17)
C (0)
E (-10)
G (0)

I know the StroboStomp comes with sweeteners for lap steel but I disabled everything except the pedal steel tunings some time ago so I wouldn't have to cycle through so many settings.

Kinda fun...

That's pretty close. To tune in Just Intonation, the offsets would be:

G +2
E -14
C 0
A -16

Everyone has a different take on this, right?

Much like you, Michael, I was interested in translating a sweetened tuning on E9 pedal steel to C6 lap steel. My LeGrande III psg really doesn’t have any cabinet drop so I like using a sixth-comma meantone temperament tuning in which the Es are tuned +5 cents. For 10 string C6 pedal steel (which I don’t play), the Cs are at +5 cents in this meantone tuning (https://b0b.com/wp/articles/a-well-tempered-c6th/).

On 6-string C6th lapsteel, I went around and around and found that John Ely’s offsets work the best for me (https://www.hawaiiansteel.com/tunings/my_tunings.php):

A (-6)
G (+6)
E (-6)
C (+4)

The lap steel has no cabinet drop so there’s no real need to account for that here. I also like having each offset close to zero, which I find helps when playing with other instruments.