Lap steel fretboard template
Where rock and blues lead players often play around the target pitch of a bend, through the use of finger vibrato, mechanical bends require spot-on intonation, which means eschewing finger vibrato altogether. The most challenging aspect of mimicking the sound of the pedal steel is performing its smooth, precise mechanical pitch bends using your fingers to push or pull one or more strings sideways, which is how you bend a note with your fingers on the guitar. We’ll practice volume swells in the exercises to come, but now let’s move on to the fundamentals of… Mechanical Bending Technique In this case, you’ll probably find that using a volume pedal works best for quick, smooth swells and fades. On other types of guitars, such as a Telecaster or Gibson Les Paul, on which the volume knob is located a couple of inches farther away from the strings, working the knob requires you to momentarily move your pick hand away from the playing position, which interrupts what you’re playing. This can be achieved using either your guitar’s volume knob or a foot-operated volume pedal, placed before the time-based effects in your signal path.Ī Strat-style guitar works best for volume-knob swells, as the knob’s close proximity to the strings enables you to easily reach it and cradle it with your pinkie while picking the strings. One of the hallmarks of the pedal steel sound is the “weeping” volume swell, heard on countless country ballads from the late ’50s to the late ’90s and beyond. A touch of soft delay and compression may be added for extra tonal bliss and smoothness.
This should give you plenty of both warmth and twang. Start by plugging a solid-body electric guitar into a clean tube amp with spring reverb, such as a Fender Deluxe or Twin, with either the middle pickup or neck and bridge pickups selected. Reproducing the pedal steel’s clear, bell-like and buzz-free tone on a guitar is a near-impossible task, but you can closely approximate it and in the process combine the essence of the two instruments’ unique characteristics in a way that gives you the best of both worlds.