Word: pedalers
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...thanks to Buddy and Jerry, the demon seed has been planted. Two years later I am asking my long-suffering parents to bail me out in my failing attempt to purchase a pedal steel on layaway, which I imprudently committed to at the beginning of the year that, by mutual consent with my father, I took off from college to ponder the relative merits of working in a piss factory and attending an Ivy League school. They oblige on a loan, and I tackle the beast. But my first dalliance is too much, too soon: The complexity of the instrument...
...author and the object of his affections SUDDENLY, IT'S 2000. AFTER 15 YEARS, the band I've been leading breaks up. But by a stroke of luck, a friend has recently bequeathed me an old ZB Custom pedal steel, and I figure, what better time to tackle my old nemesis. It turns out my gift guitar was abused as a young instrument, and I send it to Nashville to be worked on by veteran steel repairman Mike Cass, a classic tinkerer in the Bud Isaacs mode, who has a few extra metal rods custom-made for me for what...
...quite a piece of work it is: As I sit at my pedal steel, my left foot controls three pedals that each raise different pairings of strings, making new chords out of the various open chords available. On either side of my knees are levers that either raise or lower the pitch of other strings; by picking different clusters of strings and using various combinations of pedals and levers, one can play a virtually unlimited number of chord variations. My guitar has one neck, in the E ninth tuning that is the standard for country-style playing. Some...
...rarefied ranks make the sense of tradition all the stronger: At least two performers appear on stage with their fathers, and much is made of one of them, a 19-year-old who plays old-style non-pedal steel guitar. There's something touching about this awkward youth smiling uncomfortably behind his guitar, playing 50-year-old tunes note for note while his father, playing rhythm sternly behind him, reels off a spiel that was corny in Lawrence Welk's day, but I find it vaguely creepy too. Keeping the genre fresh and alive is going to take more than...
...pedal steel is the kind of specialized area of interest that is perfectly suited to the Internet, and the Steel Guitar Forum is a collegial environment where players from all over the world exchange information, swap stories and try to help each other decipher licks. It's an incredible resource: Someone will post a query about how to play a particular passage, and the forum's participants will descend on it like a pack of wolves, each trying to top the other with the accuracy of their transcriptions, so that often within minutes it will have been stripped bare like...