Word: steeles
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...idea of hooking up a pedal that would pull a single string to a preset pitch while the instrument was being played, making the movement of the note part of the style. The first recording to feature this was 1953's "Slowly," by Webb Pierce, with Isaacs on steel, and the cat was out of the bag. More pedals were added, and then knee levers, which provided new ways to raise or lower the pitch of the strings. By the late '50s the pedal steel guitar - now up to 10 strings - was pretty much the way we know it today...
...Sage - sort of a rockin'-country adjunct to the Grateful Dead - at the Academy of Music. Perhaps my proximity to the mirror ball overhead clouds my judgment, but it is my distinct impression that my skull has been imploded by the virtuoso performance of Buddy Cage, the Riders' pedal steel player. Cage is the real deal, a country veteran who played on Anne Murray's first five albums; in contrast, the Dead's Jerry Garcia, the New Riders' original steel player, was a relative dilettante on the instrument who happened to play the steel break on Crosby, Stills & Nash...
...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...