Tag: pedal steel guitar

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Sabbatical: Week 6 Update

It has been quite a productive week. I was able to record 17 phrases on pedal steel guitar. I recorded two each for A300, 727, DC-10, DC-9, & 747. I recorded three phrases for DC-8 and 707. I also recorded a phrase for the center section of 737. On Saturday I booked Alumni Hall to record some piano tracks on the Yamaha C7 grand in that space. All in all I managed to record 10 phrases, two each for TriStar, 737, A300, 727, and DC-10.

Last week I explained some of the basics of how a pedal steel guitar works. This week I’ll go into a little more detail. The second movement of Rotate, 737, is nominally in F major. In the center section of the piece I decided to use 3 seventh chords: an F major seventh, a D minor seventh, and an A dominant seventh. Let’s investigate how you can do this on a pedal steel guitar. This will allow us to review what we learned about tuning and the foot pedals from last week.

Above, we see the open strings of an E9 pedal steel guitar. Playing a major seventh chord in this tuning is simple, you simply play strings 2-6 simultaneously (with the low B on the left being string 10). In order to get an F major seventh, then we’d simply play those strings with the steel over where the first fret would be.

There several ways to get a minor seventh chord. Last week I went over how you could use the first two pedals of the instrument to get a chord built on scale degree four or six. Remember that the first pedal changes all of your B strings to C#, and the middle pedal changes all of your G# strings to A. When we press just the first pedal, the E major chord we get from strings 3-6 is now a C# minor chords. Likewise, when we press the first two pedals at the same time, our E major chord is now an A major chord. We are going to use these two pedals to create a D minor seventh chord.

Let’s think about that chord in the context of C major. We could also think of that chord as being an F major chord (a IV chord) with an additional D (scale degree two). We can get a IV chord by using the first two foot pedal. The additional scale degree two we can get from string 7 (F# is scale degree two in E major). Since we are thinking in C major for this chord, we would have to strum strings 3-7 with the first two pedals down, and our steel positioned over where the 8th fret would be (C is 8 half steps above E).

How about our A dominant seventh chord? We found that major seventh chords on a pedal steel guitar are easy. Here’s where the knee levers come into play. Again, there is no standard for how many knee levers a pedal steel guitar has, nor is there a standard configuration. My instrument has three knee levers. They would be labelled LKL, LKR, and RKR. Those abbreviations stand for left knee left, left knee right, and right knee right. Thus, I have two knee levers for my left leg, and one for my right.

While there are no standards, there is some logic used in setups. For instance LKL and LKR on my instrument both affect the E strings. This makes sense because you’d never want to use both levers at the same time, which is important as it is pretty much impossible to move your knee to left and to the right at the same time. On my instrument LKL raises the E strings to F, while LKR lowers the E strings to D#. The final knee lever, RKR, lowers the D string to C# and the D# string to D. Thus, it is this knee lever that allows me to lower the D# to D, which when combined with strings 3-6 gives a dominant seventh chord. So, in order to get an A dominant seventh chord, I would string strings 2-6 with RKR engaged with the steel positioned over where the fifth fret would be (A is 5 half steps above E).

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Sabbatical: Week 5 Update

Well, I’m a third of the way into my sabbatical, and the past week has been pretty successful. I’ve finished my fretless bass recordings, and have started recording pedal steel guitar. I recorded phrases for the center sections of seven movements: 737, A300, DC-8, 727, DC-10, DC-9, & 747. The fretless phrases I recorded for 737 and DC-8 replaced recordings I made last week where I wasn’t satisfied with what I played. I’m much happier with the new versions.

In terms of the pedal steel recordings, I’ve only begun to scratch the surface, recording four phrases, two each for TriStar and 737. Pedal steel is a fascinating, but very complicated instrument. I haven’t played it much in past few months, so a significant amount of time was spent tuning the 10 strings, calibrating the tuning for a couple of the foot pedals, and reacquainting myself with the instrument.

A standard pedal steel guitar has 10 strings and uses E9 tuning. This tuning system was developed by a few prominent players, including Buddy Emmons. It is called E9 tuning, as it generally resembles the notes of an E9 chord, though notice that it has both a D natural, and a D#. Notice as well that the top two strings are actually lower in pitch than the third string from the top. One of the things that is fairly convenient about the tuning system is it features four consecutive strings that form a major triad (strings 3 through 6 – with 10 being the lowest string).

In typical pedal steel playing, the players left hand puts a steel on the fretboard. Typically the placement of the steel reflects what key you are in. For instance, in G major, you would place the steel above where the third fret would be, as G is three half steps above E. In order to get other notes (and harmonies) besides those given by the strings, the player typically uses the pedals and knee levers rather than moving the steel.

While there is no standard for pedal and knee lever configurations, most instruments have three pedals, and one or more knee levers. My instrument is an old GFI SM-10 with three pedals, and three knee levers. Since this is sufficiently complicated, I will only explain the two pedals I used in recording this week. The first pedal changes all the B strings to C#s (raising the string a whole step). The second pedal changes all the G# strings to As, raising the string a half step). With these two pedals and using the aforementioned strings that form a major triad (strings 3 through 6), you can get an E major chord, a C# minor chord (using pedal 1), an Esus chord (using pedal 2), or an A major chord (using both pedals 1 & 2). If we were to think of this in terms of E major, this will get us the chords on scale degrees 1, 4, and 6. Pretty clever all in all. Perhaps next week I will go into detail about some of the other pedals and how they can be used.