Tonefiend Forum

I don't own a pedal steel, but I play a lot of lap. And lazy guy that I am, I usually stick with one tuning: double-dropped D (DADGBD, low to high). You get a power chord on the low strings, a triad on the high, and a familiar layout on the interior strings. Works for me! 🙂

[/i]You're[i] lazy? Uh, I don't play the pedals either; scares the bejezuz out of me, to be honest.
The steel (and tuning) I was referring to is a lap steel, although it's a bulky three-legged console type. It's an old Guyatone (pretty sure they didn't build anything with pedals), fairly faithful copy of a Fender Stringmaster. Having two eight string necks is pretty sweet though, giving you multiple voicing at your fingertips. It does however eat up huge amounts of precious stage space and weigh a ton. This tuning could be adapted to six-string lap steels without losing its essence; I'd just drop the 5th and 7th at the low end. There's some good shots of the instrument here:
https://inspireformation.blogspot.ca/2012/06/ebow-fun.html
Just click on the vid.
As for your go-to tuning, I gotta' try that! Possibilities simply boggle! (As do the "why the hell didn't I think of that" recriminations.) My gigging steel is a six-string Epi Electar ('39 with '60's era Japanese guts) and could do with a little shake up;)

We sort of touched on the fretting-behind-the-slide thing over in the gear section. Anyone a closet Sonny Landreth? Favourite grips? Set-up tips? Slide profile of preference? My efforts have been rattly and halting at best, despite tall action and beefy strings.

Quote from Jeff_H on August 13, 2012, 13:42
I have a mandolin and a ukulele. The mandolin makes me think about intervals differently, and the uke makes me think about key/position. It's fun to do something different once in awhile.

I have two of each of these as well. Acoustic and electric. I started out playing mandolin about the same time I took up guitar and bass so it was never too much a matter of "oh god what am I doing?" - I learned the same tunes on mandolin and guitar and each one has its "space" in my brain. That said, years later I thought it would be easy to pick up the violin - I got an electric about 12 years ago, my first eBay purchase - and WOW was that difficult. Yes my left hand more or less knew the scale positions, but intonation, bowing, different muscles involved, it was more than I was willing to go through. That my twins were born two years later had NOTHING to do with it!

Ukulele on the other hand has been a blast. At first, I was playing a number of tunes I knew on the guitar on it. And fiddle tunes at that, because, well, I know a few dozen of those. I was tempted to replace the G string with an octave down string so that melodies which went down that far wouldn't suddenly jump up. But I have not done this because the uke tuning of that G string just makes the sound of the thing so sparkly. I am just forging ahead with uke arrangements out of a book I bought. Another thing about uke is I do not use a pick at all and after awhile doing this I became less likely to use a pick back on the guitar. I haven't become Jeff Beck or Chet Atkins however.

Regarding the electric mandolin, for some reason I bought a 4-string. Was I going to go all distorto on it? My best results on this thing have been clean sounds with the treble backed off. Never really found a distorted sound I liked. And yes at that point, it just sounds like an electric guitar, although the chord voicings are distinctive - assuming you can hear them, another vote against too much distortion. And it's harder to bend strings on that short scale. I would certainly use it to play fast fiddle tunes. But for rock or blues I'd probably go back to the guitar.

Have you ever noticed that the third in whatever open tuning you choose needs to be tuned a bit flat to make the chord ring true? It doesn't matter which axe or how closely I've intonated it, it always sounds out if I tune the third right up to pitch. A few cents flat, and everything comes into focus. Just another result of a flawed tempering scheme I expect...

So there I was setting up for a festival gig this last Sunday, many, many miles from home, when I discovered to my horror that I left my trusty Brozophonic bar at home. This is a gig that requires me to play a fair bit of lap steel. Rats. Luckily I had a fairly weighty Harris tapered brass slide with me and I hacked my way through the set with it. During our last number I found myself wondering "What the hell am I going to do for this solo?" and failed to come up with any good answers, so I did what I usually do and picked some random lick to react to. The brass slide did a fluke bounce of the top string, producing a neat, tight little triplet. Aha! That became the whole focus of the solo. I found a new technique and played the most blistering steel solo that I've produced in years. Cool!