Pedal steel guitar

thumb|Modern pedal steel guitar with two necks

The pedal steel guitar is a console steel guitar with pedals and knee levers that change the pitch of certain strings, enabling more varied and complex music to be played than with other steel guitar designs. Like all steel guitars, it can play unlimited glissandi (sliding notes) and deep vibrati—characteristics it shares with the human voice. Pedal steel is most commonly associated with country music and Hawaiian music.

Pedals were added to a lap steel guitar in 1940, allowing the performer to play a major scale without moving the bar and also to push the pedals while striking a chord, making passing notes slur or bend up into harmony with existing notes. The latter creates a unique sound that has been popular in country and western music—a sound not previously possible on steel guitars before pedals were added.

From its first use in Hawaii in the 19th century, the steel guitar sound became popular in the United States in the first half of the 20th century and spawned a family of instruments designed specifically to be played with the guitar in a horizontal position, also known as "Hawaiian-style". The first instrument in this chronology was the Hawaiian guitar also called a lap steel; next was a lap steel with a resonator to make it louder, first made by National and Dobro Corporation. The electric guitar pickup was invented in 1934, allowing steel guitars to be heard equally with other instruments. Electronic amplification enabled subsequent development of the electrified lap steel, then the console steel, and finally the pedal steel guitar.

Playing the pedal steel requires simultaneous coordination of both hands, both feet and both knees (knees operate levers on medial and lateral sides of each knee); the only other instrument with similar requirements is the American reed organ. Pioneers in the development of the instrument include Buddy Emmons, Jimmy Day, Bud Isaacs, Zane Beck, and Paul Bigsby. In addition to American country music, the instrument is used in sacred music in the eastern and southern United States (called Sacred Steel), jazz, and Nigerian Music.

Early history and evolution

In the late 19th century, Spanish guitars were introduced in the Hawaiian Islands by European sailors and Mexican "vaqueros". Hawaiians did not embrace the standard guitar tuning that had been in use upon their introduction. Rather, they re-tuned the guitars to make them sound a major chord when all six strings were strummed, now known as an "open tuning". The term for this is "slack-key" because certain strings were "slackened" to achieve it. It is physically difficult to hold a steel bar against the strings while holding the guitar against the body and the Hawaiians laid the guitar across the lap and played it while sitting. Playing this way became popular throughout Hawaii and spread internationally. Beauchamp became interested, and went to a shop near his home to learn more. The shop was owned by a violin repairman named John Dopyera. Dopyera and his brother Rudy, showed Beauchamp a prototype of theirs which looked like a big Victrola horn attached to a guitar, but it was not successful. Buoyed by their success, Beauchamp joined the Dopyera brothers in forming a company to pursue their invention. The new resonator invention was promoted at a lavish party in Los Angeles and demonstrated by the well-known Hawaiian steel player Sol Hoopii. An investor wrote a check for $12,000 that very night.

When connected to an electronic amplifier and loudspeaker, it worked. and two, perhaps unrealized at the time, that electrified guitars no longer had to have the traditional guitar shape—this profoundly influenced electric guitar designs forever forward.

Lap steel

thumb|Rickenbacker lap steel guitar, Electro B6, with Beauchamp horseshoe pickup, late 1930s

The first lap steels had a smaller body, but still retained a guitar-like shape. Instrument makers rapidly began making them into a rectangular block of wood with an electric pickup, the precursor of the pedal steel. According to music writer Michael Ross, the first electrified stringed instrument on a commercial recording was a western swing tune by Bob Dunn in 1935. He recorded with Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies. The inherent limitation of the lap steel was its constraint to very limited chords not changeable during a performance without re-tuning. For that reason, scores of different tunings are available for lap steel players.

Lap steel becomes console steel

The next problem to be dealt with was the need to play with different voicings on the same guitar; i.e., the way the strings are tuned. The only way to accomplish this at the time was the addition of a duplicate neck and strings on the same instrument, tuned differently.thumb|Rickenbacker Console 758 tripleneck steel - 2011 TSGA Jamboree Players continued to add more necks, eventually getting up to four. This meant a bigger and heavier instrument, now called a "console" which necessitated putting it on a stand or legs rather than the performer's lap. Noel Boggs, a lap steel player with Bob Wills, received the first steel guitar made by instrument maker Leo Fender in 1953. Fender relied on prominent performers to field test his instruments. Boggs was one of the first players to switch to a different neck during a solo. In 1939, a guitar called the "Electradaire" featured a pedal controlling a solenoid, triggering an electrical apparatus to change the tension on the strings. This was not successful. That same year, bandleader Alvino Rey worked with a machinist to design pedals to change the pitch of strings but was without success. The Harlan Brothers of Indianapolis created the "Multi-Kord" with a universal pedal that could fairly easily be configured to adjust the pitch of any or all strings, but was extremely hard to push when tensioning all strings at once. Bigsby put pedals on a rack between the two front legs of the steel guitar. The pedals operated a mechanical linkage to apply tension to raise the pitch of the strings.

Bigsby built guitars incorporating his design for the foremost steel players of the day, including Speedy West, Noel Boggs, and Bud Isaacs, but Bigsby was a one-man operation working out of his garage at age 56, and not capable of keeping up with demand. The second model Bigsby made went to Speedy West, who used it extensively. Of this recording of "Slowly", steel guitar virtuoso Lloyd Green said, "This fellow, Bud Isaacs, had thrown a new tool into musical thinking about the steel with the advent of this record that still reverberates to this day." added knee levers to the pedal steel guitar capable of bending notes downward. The player can move each knee either right, left or up (depending on the model) triggering different pitch changes. The levers function basically the same as foot pedals, and may be used alone, in combination with the other knee, or more commonly, in combination with one or two foot pedals. They were first added to Ray Noren's console steel. The additional strings allow the player to play a major scale without moving the bar. He also developed and patented a mechanism to raise and lower the pitch of a string on a steel guitar and return to the original pitch without going out of tune. The Sho-Bud instruments of the day had all the latest features: 10 strings, the third pedal, and the knee levers.

Modern pedal steel

thumb|A song played on an E9 pedal steel guitar. The pedal steel continues to be an instrument in transition. The different necks have distinctly different voicings. The C6 has a wider pitch range than the E9, mostly on the lower notes.

Certain players prefer different setups regarding which function the pedals and levers perform, and which string tuning is preferred. In the early 1970s, musician Tom Bradshaw coined the term copedent ( ), a portmanteau of "chord-pedal-arrangement". Often represented in table form, it is a way of specifying the instrument's tuning, pedal and lever setup, string gauges and string windings.

There are proponents of a "universal tuning" to combine the two most popular modern tunings (E9 and C6) into a single 12 or 14-string neck that encompasses some features of each.

Use in non-traditional genres

The pedal steel is most commonly associated with American country music, but it is also sometimes heard in jazz, sacred music, popular music, nu jazz, and African music. The steel guitar was embraced by the congregation and often took the place of an organ. The first documented use of a pedal (rather than lap) steel in this tradition was in 1952, but it did not become

common until the early 1970s. Neil Strauss, writing in the New York Times, called Randolph "one of the most original and talented pedal steel guitarists of his generation.

The pedal steel guitar became a signature component of Nigerian Juju music in the late 1970s. Nigerian bandleader King Sunny Adé featured pedal steel guitar in his 17 piece band, which, wrote New York Times reviewer Jon Pareles, introduces "a twang or two from American blues and country" Norwegian jazz trumpeter Nils Petter Molvaer, considered a pioneer of future jazz (a fusion of jazz and electronic music), released the album Switch, which features the pedal steel guitar.

Notes

References

External links

Universal tuning
The British Steelies Society Forum
Steel Guitar Forum – A discussion site for pedal steel, lap steel, and related musical instruments
Steel Guitar Jazz – A website featuring pedal and nonpedal steel guitar in jazz music – run by Jim Cohen
www.pedalsteel.co.uk – website run by Bob Adams