Ron uses bottleneck on standard guitars, as well as steel guitars. I am a bit confused about i) techiques and ii) reached effects.

i) Bottleneck on a standard guitars gives a slide effect. What about steel guitars? Do you pick the notes with the right hand, sliding with the left hand with a bottleneck? Can you also play it harp-like, using both right and left hand to pick with "nails" that you put on your 5 or 10 fingers?

ii) And here is the most important, because as listeners we care more about the music than about the techniques. How would you compare standard guitars with bottleneck versus steel guitars to reach climas in a) blues, and b) country?

Some sites of interest:


[www.bigroadblues.com]

[www.b0b.com] and for the awfully complicated tuning technique [www.b0b.com]

Pedal Steel guitars have more strings than standard guitars. I believe they have ten strings, and many of them have two fretboards/necks. AFAIK pedal steels are always open tuned, and they got some pedals to change the string tuning while in middle of a song. It's the one featured on the picture on your first bOb.com link. There is another kind of steel guitars (the kind used by Ronnie on the Licks Tour) that features one neck (don't know how many strings, btw). Thay are called lapsteels. Check this link to see what I mean: [ []]

While we wait for the experts, I believe both of them are played picking the strings with the right hand and sliding the bottleneck with the left, as you say. I don't know if they are played harp-like, but I don't believe so.

As about the sound, check Faraway Eyes for a classic pedal steel guitar country feeling. It's the best example that comes to my mind. Pedal Steels give that country-hawaiian feeling, you know.

(I bet I didn't told you anything new, Joker, did I ??)

[There'll be no wedding today...]



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2005-03-21 15:07 by bruno.

By the way, if I recall correctly, lapsteels were the first solidbody electric guitars technically speaking.

[There'll be no wedding today...]

Bruno : you are too modest, I certaintly learnt, thanks for the contribution.

For some historical background and bibliographical references I copy from the Grove Music Online, the authoritative music encyclopedia (unfortunately only accessible for subscribers, i have it at work).


Pedal steel guitar.

A development of the lap steel guitar (see Hawaiian guitar) in which the application of pedals enables the player to change instantaneously from one tuning to another. As performing technique developed, players of the Hawaiian guitar came to depend on using a variety of open tunings. In order to be able to move between these tunings at will, players began to use instruments with more than one neck. However, this meant that instruments became increasingly unwieldy as more necks were added. In the 1940s makers such as Bigsby in California and Epiphone in New York started to offer a solution by limiting the number of necks to two but adding pedals which, attached to a system of ‘changers’ and ‘fingers’ on the instrument, would enable the player to alter tunings as desired. At first players were happy to operate the systems as designed, using the pedals to move to new tunings as if they had changed necks. But gradually guitarists adapted the system to provide some novel musical effects, and used the pedals to change the pitch of one string while another was sounding. One of the first recorded examples of this ‘slurring’ effect, which is now considered to be the pedal steel guitar’s most characteristic sound, is featured in a solo played by Bud Isaacs on Webb Pierce’s 1954 song Slowly. From about that time the pedal steel guitar almost completely replaced the lap steel guitar, especially in country music where the pedal steel guitar became a virtually compulsory component of the genre.

The standard number of pedals for a twin-necked instrument is eight. Pitch-changing knee-levers (usually four in number) were added later, giving the instrument even greater versatility. Most pedal steel guitars are fitted with ten strings on each of two necks, although some have eight, 12 or 14. Twin-neck guitars usually have one set of strings tuned to a chord of E9, and the other to C6. Until the 1970s many of the large guitar manufacturers such as Fender and Gibson made pedal steel guitars, but as manufacturing costs increased and demand subsided, the market was largely left to small, independent makers such as Sho-Bud and Emmons, joined in the 1990s by newer makers, such as Matses and Morrell, all in the USA.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
T. Wheeler: American Guitars: an Illustrated History (New York, 1982)
T. Bacon: The Ultimate Guitar Book (London, 1991)
G. Gruhn and W. Carter: Electric Guitars and Basses: a Photographic History (San Francisco, 1994)


Hawaiian guitar [lap steel guitar, steel guitar].

A variant of the guitar, developed in Hawaii in the second half of the 19th century. Early types are classified as chordophones: lutes; later types, such as that depicted in the illustration, are classified as chordophones: zithers. Around 1830 Mexican cattle herders introduced the guitar into Hawaii. The Hawaiians took up the instrument and incorporated it into their own music with appropriate ‘slack key’ or open tuning in which the strings are all tuned to the notes of a major triad. Joseph Kekuku has usually been given credit for introducing the technique of sliding a comb (later the back of a penknife) along the strings of a guitar placed across the knees to produce the glissandos for which Hawaiian music has become known. Kekuku, who developed and popularized the technique beginning in 1885, may have learnt it from a man called Davion, who had come from India; there the technique of playing strings with a rod or slider has been used since the 19th century on the gottuvâdyam (a type of fretless vînâ). In the early 20th century this music became popular in the USA, where guitar companies began to market Hawaiian guitars with a raised nut, which held the strings higher above the fingerboard than on a normal guitar, and a steel bar as an accessory for slide playing (hence the name ‘steel guitar’); the use of other objects, such as a bottleneck, for a similar sort of slide playing developed in blues at much the same time, and later became common in country music. Many musicians who played in Hawaiian style adopted the Resonator guitar during the early 1930s, while others took up the earliest manufactured Electric guitar, the Rickenbacker ‘Frying Pan’ (1932), a small steel guitar that was designed to be played across the lap. Leg-mounted electric steel guitars were introduced by the Gibson company during the 1930s. By the 1950s some models had as many as four necks. Another type, the Pedal steel guitar, incorporated knee-levers and several pedals for rapid alterations in tuning.


BIBLIOGRAPHY
M. Brisenden: ‘In a Hula Heaven: the Story of the Hawaiian Guitar’, Collusion, no.4 (1983), 10
M. Hood: ‘Musical Ornamentation as History: the Hawaiian Steel Guitar’, YTM, xv (1983), 141–8


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"Music is the frozen tapioca in the ice chest of history."

"Shit!... No shit, awright!"

here's a link for the "inventopr of the steel guitar"

[www.hawaiimusicmuseum.org]

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"Music is the frozen tapioca in the ice chest of history."

"Shit!... No shit, awright!"

Wooo, THAT is complicated.

During Licks Tour, Ron used steel guitar at least on No Expectations, correct?

Yep, with his solo on CYHMK his most "clearly audible" contribution during the club show I attended (Vredenburg).

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"Music is the frozen tapioca in the ice chest of history."

"Shit!... No shit, awright!"

Greg, thanks for the info. Great article.

[There'll be no wedding today...]

Greg : your information is nice, shows how "unstable" steel guitars are in their shape as instruments. It reminds another "freak" instrument, the stick Chapman, which variates from 8 strings to 12 strings.