The Steel Guitar Forum

How did you learn to play the pedal steel guitar? how long would you say it took to feel real good about yourself playing behind a band?

I only saw a pedal steel once before buying one. I sat down and figured out how it was tuned, what the pedals and knee levers did and where the chords were at. Then I taught myself to play over the next 25 years or so. I still suck, but I'm at peace with that now.
Dave

Mike,
What I did was practice like crazy and go see every steel player I could find. Then I would bug them for a lesson. Fats Kaplan got me started and I would drive down to Virginia to get lessons with Buddy Charleton when I could. I still try to see him when I can. I got some Joe Wright lesson material and had a private lesson with him once that was a real breakthrough.

I started playing a steady bar gig within months. I was terrible ! But it was my gig so I couldn't get fired. I took me about 3 years to feel like I could play music at all on the thing and about 5 years before I started feeling expressive. I'm not as talented as some so things take longer for me.

Have fun,

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Bob
intonation help


<font size="1" color="#8e236b"><p align="center">[This message was edited by Bob Hoffnar on 25 March 2005 at 07:31 AM.]</p></FONT>

I bought a ZB Custom Student steel with 3 pedals and 1 lever off of ebay. It needed work, but I wasn't about to spend $1000+ on something I knew nothing about.

I taught myself with Winnie Winston's book. I started looking for folks to play with after about 4 months (practicing about an hour a day). I had a solid musical background when I started and plenty of experience as a working musician so your milage may vary.

I wasn't good (still ain't), but a little steel can go a long way (and steel players are hard to find around here). I'll have to let you know when I feel "real good" about playing with a band. If you wait until you feel "real good" about it, you'll sit in your basement forever.

Mike,

I had played a bit of lap steel and was already frustrated by the limitations of bar slants, so I knew what I needed to have in order to get the sounds in my head out before I ever saw a pedal steel guitar. We had a little Maverick in the store I was working in (Giant Music, Arlington, VA, 1972) but I couldn't make sense of it until an anonymous (wish I knew now who it was!) NV session picker came in one day, tuned it up for me and played a few rides. I saw how he was getting diatonic scales with the 3 and 5 strings and A and B pedals (just exactly what I was searching for!) and bought it from my boss the next day. It was the old blonde birdseye maple model with the stainless ends, no knee levers at all, just the three pedals, but it had lots of room for me to learn on.

I took it home and plugged it into an old 5 watt car radio (no volume pedal yet) so I could hear it and started studying and playing along with:
The Byrds "Sweetheart of the Rodeo" - JayDee Maness and Lloyd Green
Gram Parson "GP" - Buddy Emmons and Al Perkins
John Sebastian "Rainbows All Over Your Blues" - Buddy Emmons
Hank Williams "Greatest Hits"
Grateful Dead "Workingmans Dead" - Jerry Garcia plays some pretty good sounding but relatively easy stuff with some fairly tricky chord changes on "Dire Wolf"

I knew nobody who knew much more than me about the instrument at the time, but I was surrounded by the likes of Peter Vonta, Roy Buchanan and Danny Gatton, whose guitar playing gave me a lot of ideas, and friends did let me play at jams a lot.

After about eight months of this I was invited to move to Boston to play with a real club band thatr a jammer friend of mine played drums with. Once in a while I WAS happy with what I played, but it was an elusive phenomena - my introduction to the tricky psychological side of playing this thing. This is where I met my first real PSG players, who were all incredibly encouraging ("You can play, man, when are you gonna get a REAL instrument?")

Thirty-some years later I stumbled across the Steel Guitar Forum and found out how little I really know. At this point I am not always happy with what comes out of the thing, but most nights I hear something that I like a lot, and the folks around me keep asking me back. That's progress.

Keep at it until you can't sit down no more, that's the secret of playing the pedal steel guitar. Oh yeah, the more you drink the better it DOESN'T get!

Enjoy

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<font size="2"><img align=right src="http://www.pdxaudio.com/dgsept03.jpg" width="114 height="114">Dave Grafe - email: dg@pdxaudio.com
Production
Pickin', etc.

1978 ShoBud Pro I E9, Randall Steel Man 500, 1960 Les Paul (SG) Deluxe, 1963 Precision Bass, 1954 Gibson LGO, 1897 Washburn Hawaiian Steel Conversion</font>

Like the Alan Jackson song, my steel playing is a work in progress. I started, really, playing slide guitar, then began to play some lap steel. From there, I borrowed a couple Mavericks and had another three pedal, one lever steel for a while. After the frustration of not being able to play a lot of the things I liked, I bought a Sho-Bud 12 and a friend of mine gave me a ton of Jeff Newman books, old Pedal Steel magazines and the Winnie Winston book. I also watched the Bruce Bouton video.

From there I just began to practice, going through the materials I had. Then I started learning parts from records. I'm still learning. Its not an easy instrument to play well. I figure I will keep learning as long as I play. I am especially fond of the Jeff Newman stuff. He gives you a lot of patterns and pockets, as well as good durable licks that can be applied to any music. His methods just made sense to me.

I think Dave Grafe expressed the secret of learning pedal steel very well! You just have to keep at it and practice hard.

What Dave, and Al said about the practicing!! I set mine up in the living room instead of the bedroom. Didn't have room in the bedroom after my wife moved the TV in there!!! And I'm constantly amazed at how much I "don't" know!! Just gatta keep at it!!
Larry

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Emmons S/D-10, 3/4, Sessions 400 Ltd. Home Grown E/F Rack
"ROCKIN COUNTRY"

Hey Mike, good topic ..
You're question is valid but in all proabablility the timing will vary from player to player..

Those that have a strong background may find it a bit easier because all they have to do is apply what they already know..they are not attempting to learn the musical language at the same time.

Those that have minimal or no musical background have to learn both the Instrument and the musical language together..

Thats like going to France and learning French the same day..

You have a good background on Bass which should jump start you for playing with others, taking what you already know and applying it to another Instrument.

ok now the answer you asked for..., for me, I had been playing guitar for about 12 or 13 years so my ability to play ( fake) with others on Steel was proabably a year and a half. This was back in the early to mid 70's...

Here it is some 30 years later and I'm still trying to get over the hump..

By the way, the JH tune is great..but the band decided not to play it afterall ! Go figure..

see you soon

t<font size="1" color="#8e236b"><p align="center">[This message was edited by Tony Prior on 25 March 2005 at 03:43 PM.]</p></FONT>

I was already a guitar player when I bought my first pedal steel. I took it home, set it up, and began to figure out where the chords were, and what the pedals did. Then I put on Merle records and tried to play along. About a year after I got the guitar, I enrolled at the Hank Thompson School of Country Music at a Jr. College in Oklahoma, where they had a steel guitar teacher. I got some lessons there from a great player, Mr. Gene Crane. I also started playing with bands at the school, and outside bands on weekends.
30 years later I am still learning. I'm thinking about spending a day or two in Nashville this summer to get with Mike Sweeney if he is in town and taking students. Playing 4 or 8 hours a week in bands most of my life has probably been my best teacher. I do try to practice at least a half hour every day, and I try to learn something new each time... doesn't always happen. This is an instrument with a L-O-N-G-G-G learning curve, but lots of fun!

I, too, was a guitarist of 25 years before I played steel. All that prior training obviously helped jumpstart my playing.

I got a couple instructional videos, but those were tedious compared to lifting licks off CD's and tapes, and making it all fit on the bandstand.

I had a couple of lessons, one with Joe Wright and a couple Larry Bell. Kudos to Larry for spending hours turning me onto all sorts of cool stuff.

FWIW,
Drew

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<font size=1>Drew Howard - website - Fessy D-10 8/8, Magnatone S-8, N400's, BOSS RV-3</font>

BELIEVE IT OR NOT JESUS CHRIST GAVE ME THIS TALENT TO PLAY STEEL GUITAR THANK YOU JESUS.

My Mom Bought me my first steel, a Miller 8 string with 4 pedals when I was in high school. Having played only saxophone and clarinet, I didn't have a clue about anything with strings!

After floundering around for a year, I traded the Miller on a brand new Emmons S-10.Then it all started to make sense, although I did wear out all of my moms' Buck Owens albums!

Harry T.

I played 3 to 4 hours a day for the first three months after I bought my first steel. I am not the fastest learner that ever sat down but I tried to listen to as many steel players as I could. I watched shows on television and played with records. I knew a couple of steel players and I was able to get with them on occasion but most of it come from the school of hard knocks. That was 25 years ago and I still love this instrument. Jr. Knight was my first television influence when he played with Dewey Groom and the Longhorn Ballroom Band. They were the guest stars on the Cowboy Weaver show on Saturday afternoon. He had the biggest role in giving me the desire to want to play the steel guitar. Like the gentleman mentioned the Good Lord give the talent we are blessed with.

My story might not be too common, but I bought a single 10 MSA on a Wednesday and played it on stage that Friday -- and most every Fri/Sat/Sun for many years after. Like Drew, I was a veteran guitar player and had played Dobro for a year or so. I had studied the chord positions carefully and practiced the string grips to avoid 1,2,7.9 for major chords and was able to 'chord along' and add just enough steel flavor to make it worthwhile. I would play steel on about 2/3 of the songs and guitar on the rest. After six months, I no longer took my guitar to gigs.

My thanks to those with whom and for whom I played. This method of learning to swim in the deep end was effective for me, but I don't recommend it for the faint of heart.

Since then, I've had three lessons over the course of the first twenty years or so I played and each lesson brought on a major growth spurt. Now that it's been almost 30, maybe I'm due for another lesson. I might have to fly to Phoenix to find Mike Smith, but it would be worth it. He taught me stuff 20 years ago that I'm still using -- not just licks, but ways to visualize where notes lie on the neck and navigate between pockets of notes.

My recommendation for a beginner is FIND A TEACHER and FIND OTHERS TO PLAY WITH.

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<small>Larry Bell - email: larry@larrybell.org - gigs - Home Page
2003 Fessenden S/D-12 8x8, 1969 Emmons S-12 6x6, 1971 Dobro, Standel and Peavey Amps

The Buddy Cage in "Festival Express" thread brought back a lot of memories of the time I began learning steel guitar. I was taking hawaiian guitar lessons from Ken Near at the same time as Buddy was. Ken purchased the first Emmons guitar I ever saw in the mid 60's. Ken was a great teacher. Even back then, I knew that Buddy was going to take the steel guitar in a different direction. One of the best memories is when we went from playing hawaiin music to country. The three of us went to an Ernest Tubb concert, and we got to talk to Buddy Charleton. We asked him what the "Nashville Tuning" was,a.k.a. E9th. Mr. Charleton explained to us the notes and pedal changes used in that tuning, so after that show we went home and tried our new tuning. I remember the first song Ken taught us in that tuning was the steel break for the Buck Owens song, "Above and Beyond". That was not long after I went from playing a Fender lap steel to a Fender 400 pedal steel bought for me by my parents.

I remember back before I started playing steel, I was looking for an electric piano and I went to a little music store called Dixieland Music. The place was small and I was walking through there and saw two pedal steel guitars sitting side by side. I think one of them was a Fender. So, by the end of 1999 at Christmas, my mom and dad got me my first pedal steel guitar, my Emmons S-10. And I learned to play by playing along with country records. I would listen to some songs and the steel parts, and then play along with the songs to see if I could play the steel parts in the same key as the steel on whatever song I was playing along with. Brett, Emmons S-10, Morrell lapsteel, GFI Ultra D-10

Thanks for all the replys,I was just making sure i was on the same track as everyone else.I'd like to say that i also am a work in progress and am very pleased with the progress i've made in the past year and a half,I'm not progressing as fast as i'd like but hey I am making some progress.maybe i'm trying to perfect this steel in less than 4 or 5 years.NOT!!!!!!!!!!

I started learning in 1990 with some Newman courses. I am still learning and have a long way to go. I may never get better, but on the advice of Tom Brumley, as long as you enjoy it, don't quit. I enjoy it.!!!
Charley

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Sho-Bud PRO-I, 4&5

Anyone who has seen Dave Ristrim play knows he's just bein' bashful here...

I would like to thank Danny Dunn for helping me when I first started to play. He showed me how to play some Bobby Black licks from Commander Cody. It was a little different when I brought a Larry Ballard album over and asked him to show me some very fast Paul Franklin solos. He had that look of fear in his eyes while trying to figure them out. He nailed most of them. Thanks Danny...<font size="1" color="#8e236b"><p align="center">[This message was edited by Tom Stolaski on 08 April 2005 at 06:56 AM.]</p></FONT>

Me too.
I have had three lessons in 30 years. One from Danny Dunn and two from Mike Smith. I owe both of those guys for the fact that I still can't play everything they showed me TO THIS DAY.


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<small>Larry Bell - email: larry@larrybell.org - gigs - Home Page
2003 Fessenden S/D-12 8x8, 1969 Emmons S-12 6x6, 1971 Dobro, Standel and Peavey Amps

Well here goes. Talk about a work in progress. When I was 11 years old (Im 48 now) my dad (Bobby Garrett) gave me lessons on a 10 string Rickenbacker lap steel for about 2 years. At that time I didn't know that he was my dad. In fact I wouldn't have that information until about 4 years back. One day it came time for my lesson and I sat there on the bed with that little lap steel and waited. He never showed up and Mom told me he had gone back on the road so there were no more lessons. I was so upset that I put that little steel under my bed for over 30 years and had no intention of playing again. Now fast forward to 4 years ago and I learned the truth about Bobby being my dad. I picked up the 6 string first and within a couple years got to where I could pretty much play along with anything I wanted to plug in. Then about 5 months back my nerves had finally settled enough that I felt like it was time I took on the steel guitar. I began taking lessons from Bob Mc Cormick here in Tyler and I gotta say the progress is painfully slow at this point. Had I known the truth back when, I would have had it all down by now no problem. But things happen for a reason and I figure that the good Lord knew when I would need the truth and now I'm pretty much counting on him to help me over the rough spots. Yesterday for instance my playing was so bad I thought about taking this Sho Bud and using it for a trot line weight. Today its back to not being too awful. So I keep on trying because I think steel guitar is in my blood and I believe with everything I have in me that I'll play it well someday. Good luck to all us newbies. We need all the luck we can get!

Rick

My father bought a 68-69 Emmons P/P from Buddy Emmons in 1969. A year later he died and left me a 13 year kid with the guitar. Well, at 14 one of aunts married a young steel player from Houston, Texas named Bobby Bowman. When she came home for everyone to meet Bobby he took the P/P out of the case and set it up for me. Bobby was actually the first person to help me on steel. Shortly after that my mother and some friends took me to a Conway Twitty concern in Runnelstown,Ms. I met John Hughey that night for the first time in 1971. I watched John the whole night playing that old P/P with a tiger sticker on the front of it. I knew that night what I wanted to do. I was really touched by the kindness that John showed that night. It inspired me to be the best steel player I could be. To this day I still remember that night like it was yesterday. Here it is 2005 and I'm still picking and John is still one of my favorite pickers.

When you are starting from scratch, it really helps to have a good teacher that will show you the basics. In 1974 after buying a Sho-Bud Maverick I took lessons for a few months in Detroit. I think her first name was Wanda - can't remember her last name. She taught using standard notation. She told me she taught Paul Franklin. She said that Paul learned so fast that she could not teach him anything else after a short period of time.

Mike..you sure got my attention with this posting. I too find this hard. An old friend got me started with the grips..etc.and from there, I bought all the CDs I could find..and play along to the steel player. Tablature was so slow..and clumbersome I gave up on it. The Jeff Neuman courses are good,,but the CDs do it for me. ONE thing,, it is NOT the equipment.I have had several steels..amps etc..its your RIGHT HAND. All these delay units, amps etc.won't make you play better. I still can't block..I have tried all the different techniques..I still can't do that very well. Also I found that this learning curve, comes in plateaus.. you'll seem to learn in spurts..but keep at it..and it will come (so everybody tells me anyway) Good luck and keep at it..<font size="1" color="#8e236b"><p align="center">[This message was edited by Richard E. Lee on 17 April 2005 at 08:30 AM.]</p></FONT>