Well, shoot...

[Shnate McDuanus]

Over the past few months, I've absolutely fallen in love with the pedal steel guitar.

 

I blame "Sneaky" Pete Kleinow (of Flying Burrito Brothers fame) for igniting the spark.

 

Sheesh, now I get the feeling that I've been playing the wrong type of guitar.

 

I'm almost serious about the playing part. I'm completely serious about loving the sound.

[charlie brown]

Learn it well, and you'll always have a gig! Great Pedal Steel players are a lot more rare, than great

guitar players...in general. "Country" or even "Country Rock," is huge now....like it, or not.

(It really always has been...truth be told) And, there is no reason you can't learn to play the pedal steel,

if for no other reason, than to augment your capabilities!

 

Nothing wrong, at all, with being a multi-instrumentalist! Just that much more opportunities, available, to you.

Go For it!!

 

CB

[brundaddy]

Check out Junior Brown. Also the Santo & Johnny tune 'Sleepwalking.'

[Dub-T-123]

Are pedal steel and lap steel the same.

 

I like it in Pink Floyd alot.

 

It sounds so surreal to me.

[retrosurfer1959]

Nope same concept but pedal steels sit on legs and have the tone control through the pedals. Nothing wrong with either though I dont play pedal but I do have a couple of Lap Steels made by industrial Great instrumnet and a lot of fun to play in the right song.

ElectraSlide

 

Indy Rail Slide

[Shnate McDuanus]

Check out Junior Brown. Also the Santo & Johnny tune 'Sleepwalking.'

 

Yep, Junior Brown and Santo Farina get a lot of play around here, and so does Don Helms, the steel man in Hank Williams' Drifting Cowboys. I love the stuff.

 

I've always been fairly big on Country and "Country-Rock," and yeah, I can tell that the whole "Country" idiom is still pretty big--and I like it just fine. Lap Steel is awesome too, and the instrument (in general) sounds just as great in the right hands. To me, the idea of holding something on your lap while playing sounds a little awkward--but on the other hand, so does sitting behind one of them big Pedal Steel pieces. In fact, holding a guitar seemed awkward at first, but now it just feels so damn natural.

 

It might be a good idea for me to give the Lap Steel thing a try. I could do what I did to get started on guitar in the first place--playing along with recordings and what not. It may be faster this time around, too, knowing what I know about music already.

 

And of course I'd never be out of work--I figure the world could use another steel player.

[ksdaddy]

I've only had one pedal steel, a '65 Fender 800. A friend bought it from Gruhn's in '85. It had spent it's first 20 years in Nashville getting the living crap knocked out of it. He refinished it black and used it for about 7 years, then sold it to me. I kept it a year and then pawned it to pay the light bill. It sat in a back room of the pawn shop until 2004 when I bought it back for $50 more than I sold it for. I cleaned it up but didn't do squat with it. In 2006 or so a guy emailed me because he was going to be doing some steel work on a Dwight Yoakum album, as a tribute to Buck Owens, and he wanted that authentic 60s sound. (Never did learn any more about that album, whether it came to fruition or not.) He ended up finding one locally, so it stayed. Then a few months later a guy offered me $800 for it in an email, right out of the blue. It went away.

 

I never could warm up to it. I've got my brother's '79 Dobro and a '48 Supro lap steel, so I can get into quite enough trouble without my feet and knees getting into the mix.