The for-sale section is handy for when you are constantly trying to buy a new steel. What’s great about it is that you can search through the archives and find posts where Paul Franklin is asking Buddy Emmons questions and Emmons is answering.
It’s such a niche community that there is one single forum related to it on the internet. For people that don’t know what this is, can you explain? In the van you are often on The Pedal Steel Forum on your phone. It just seems easier with pick blocking to choose whether you are playing legato or staccato and to have control of the execution of a musical passage. But overall pick blocking is a much more versatile technique. To get some of the early steel tones you kinda need to palm block. Palm blocking or pick blocking? (For those that don’t know these are techniques for muting notes on a steel, and there is much debate about which is better) Still dreaming of a lesson with Paul Franklin. I’ve gotten to take a couple lessons with Susan, which has been eye opening.
Susan’s execution of new music is mind blowing. Paul can and has made it fit in every musical context including doing a world tour with Dire Straits. Paul and Susan both have reached a mastery of the instrument that I think is unprecedented. The greats: Jimmy Day, Buddy Emmons, Buddy Charleton, Paul Franklin. I occasionally try and look up so that the audience doesn’t think I’m sleeping, but I’ve given up on them knowing that I’m playing a “pedal-steel guitar.” Ricky Davis often tilts his guitar forward to show people the strings. “Slide guitar” is one that I find particularly irritating. What are the most common things people at shows have misidentified your steel guitar as?Ĭheese grater, stenographer’s typewriter, piano (most common), electric mountain dulcimer, upright horizontal lute, C&B torture machine. I haven’t figured out what’s wrong with it yet but I’m sure I’ll invent a problem soon and buy something else. It has brand-new changers C&C routed out of aluminum stock. “It’s not me, it’s the pedal steel!” My newest guitar is a 1969 Emmons push-pull that spent the ’90s touring with Joe Diffie. The only way to curb your insecurities is by constantly buying new gear. It’s very important to blame all of your problems as a player on the tools you have. You are constantly buying a new pedal steel. I talked with him about the pedal-steel guitar over coffee in Houston. He is a pedal-steel and banjo player and a nerd of the highest caliber. Read our new feature on him.Įllis: Will Van Horn plays in my band. Already an acknowledged ace on guitar at 27, Ellis has been reacquainting himself with the keys over the last few years. Ellis will be guest editing all week. Perhaps that’s why the two best tracks on a uniformly great record-the structurally sophisticated yet effortless opener “Perfect Strangers” and the brooding, soulful “California”-are keyboard-based. After a pair of solid releases that established Robert Ellis as an eccentric singer/songwriter with a traditional country foothold, his new self-titled LP is as definitive and weirdly beautiful a statement of defiance as you’d expect from a guy whose primary touchstones are Paul Simon and Randy Newman, as opposed to Townes Van Zandt and Jerry Jeff Walker.