Word: stringings
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...American music is constellated with real characters, do-it-yourselfers who couldn't stop asking "What if..." and who had the drive - and thick enough skins - to follow through on their hunches. From the basements and garages of the heartland came the electric guitar, the electric bass, the five-string banjo, the multitrack tape recorder and the pedal steel guitar. Perhaps it's our penchant for excess that leads us to make it louder, faster, different - especially different - and not everyone may see the results as signs of progress. But these brash creations are as accurate road maps...
...WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT, ALVINO, you ask? Well, it's about a sound that can by turns be as lush and languid as a full string section or as bright and bouncy as a banjo, that can be applied to the most complex jazz progressions as well as the rawest foot-stomping moonshine music. It's deeply sophisticated and wholly honky-tonk at the same time, and it's the ultimate American instrument...
...Americans, as we know, are a tinkering breed, and in the early '50s a fellow named Bud Isaacs got the 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...
...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...
Waldman, author of a new book about his experiences running the White House speechwriting operation from 1995 to 1999, said presidental addresses "are not just a string of sound bites, but the moment when politics and personality fuse to form policy...