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Hi, I’m Jonathan Gregg. I’ve been a musician most of my life. I play guitar, pedal steel and Dobro. I started with a guitar as a kid and played lots of rock-and-roll music, and ended up in some different original bands.

I was fascinated with a pedal steel from the time when I first heard it played by Buddy Cage in The New Riders of the Purple Sage, who I saw on a Thanksgiving weekend back in 1972. It was really exciting to hear that sound in a slightly more rocking context, but still clearly attached to the country idiom. But in those days there were very few resources for pedal steel players, so that made it pretty hard.

I learned some stuff, was able to figure out a few things from records, but basically I had to put it aside for a while until I learned a lot more about music. After leading a band of my own called Jonathan Gregg and the Lonesome Debonaires, it finally broke up and I really didn’t have much of a clue what to do with myself at the time.

So I thought, why not revisit the pedal steel, and just fell in with it. It was much easier the second time around because I knew more and also because the resources were so much more available. I play in several different bands.

My main bands are the Doc Marshalls, Excellent Original Americana Material, The Linemen, where I play guitar and pedal steel and share the stage with an excellent songwriter named Kevin Johnson. And a band called The Combine that does instrumental versions of old ’60s-type tunes. That includes Josh Kaufman and Brian Canter from a band called The Yellow Birds.

These guys are really happening and it’s a great little band. I also play in a bluegrass outfit called The Crusty Gentlemen, where I play Dobro, which is basically the logical medium, happy middle point between the pedal steel and a regular guitar and is much easier to carry around. But the pedal steel can play any kind of music.

I’m very happy to share with you what little knowledge I’ve been able to accumulate in my time at it, and I look forward to hearing what you can do with it, too.

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So practicing this instrument, what’s the best way to learn and what’s a good allotment of your time? I think probably the most important thing is to diversify in your acquisition of knowledge. Don’t focus only on one part of it. Of course, if you’re having a problem with that one part of it, then you need to bring your attention to bear on it and work on it until you get it right.

But try to mix up your regimen so that you’re not confined to one specific thing. Work a little bit on single note things, like rolls and stuff if you’ve got… Some kind of lick that you want to try to learn and that requires some independence of your fingers, work on that until you’re pretty well sick of that. Work on some chord stuff. Diversify in terms of the types of things you’re doing.

I’d say, also, probably the most important thing you could do is start playing with play-along tracks immediately. Because you will find yourself in a whole lot of hurt when you start playing with a band if you have not gotten used to playing with tracks with people who are playing songs in a real tempo. They have a beginning, a middle and an end.

Especially if you’re responsible for starting the song, you can practice on your own as much as you like. But when the drummer counts it off, you’ve really got to know what you’re going to do and you’ve got to be able to execute it. Otherwise, the whole thing is just going to fall apart. You’ve really got to know the song you’re playing.

It’s a lot easier to play all the way through the song all the time because you’re there at every moment. What’s harder and what’s more important to be able to master is to stop playing, to do your intro, stop and then come in when the chorus comes in… Whatever that happens to be. But you’ve got to be strong to come in at that moment when you’re required.

Listen to every pedal steel record you can get your hands on and try to figure out the stuff on it as close to what they’re doing as possible. Avail yourself of all the resources online. The pedal steel form has tons of tablature. Tab is pretty easy to read and a lot of guys who put in a lot of hours transcribing famous pedal steel solos and intros, these are really, really worth your while.

I can’t emphasize enough the importance of getting acquainted with the classic pedal steel repertoire. The best guys in the business that you’ve never heard of are all over these records and if you don’t know who Lloyd Green or JayDee Maness or Buddy Emmons, or Doug Jernigan or Tom Brumley are, then you’ve got a lot of learning to do.

Because these are the guys who made up the vocabulary, who really made the instrument what it is. You really need to know some of what they’re doing and how they did it, and there you go. I mean, it’s just acquire… Diversify your lessons. Don’t focus only on one thing and play with tracks as much as you can, as much as you can stand it.

Learn all the songs you can because those will provide the context for the licks you’re going to learn. Good luck with it.

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You may want to know what kind of devices are commonly used with Pedal Steel, and what people have used traditionally. It’s really a matter of taste, but I’ll just show you a couple of the more common ones.

Easily, the most common one is reverb. Here is what it sounds like without reverb. [plays guitar] Which is all very well and good. But then, what happens when you put on a reverb? [plays guitar] It just adds a huge, huge landscape of sound, and it’s highly desirable, in my estimation. It encourages, it plays into the hovering, hanging quality of the instrument. There’s just a lonesomeness of the reverb sound. It also gets absorbed a lot by the track that you’re going to be on, or the band you’re playing with. So even though this sounds like a fairly indulgent reverb setting, when in context, it won’t necessarily sound that vast.

For a slightly more fun experiment thing, you can also look into duplicating some of the sounds that some famed players like Sneaky Pete Kleinow or Buddy Cage used in the ’70’s, when Pedal Steel was meeting Rock music, or at least slightly revved-up country music, for the first time and using a distortion unit.

Now, you’ve already got plenty of sustained bass on your tone bar, being as heavy as it is, and the nature of the instrument. But then if you add the distortion that you can get with The RAT, which is a common, very popular distortion pedal, you will have some pretty impressively gnarly sounds. [plays guitar] And so on, and so forth. You will drive your neighbors crazy, and you will have lots of fun. Don’t overuse it. It’s a device, it’s an effect, and really is best enjoyed in small doses. But it will give any guitar player around you a run for his money, in terms of just animal Rock power.

Those are probably the most common. Choruses, digital delays are also fairly common. A digital delay is really just an echo pedal. Used sparingly, but with good taste, it can be very effective in perpetuating that hovering kind of quality that the reverb already has. It’s a good way of getting it.

Pedal Steel, properly played, has a very chorus-y sound to begin with, and it’s not really an instrument that needs to be treated a lot. It has an inherent quality. Reverb is going to be the one thing you’re most likely to use and everything else is just sort of the gravy on top.

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So what is the pedal steel guitars role in a lot of the stuff you might be likely to be playing on? It’s chiefly associated with country music, but it’s certainly not limited to that. But let’s just for the sake of argument stick to country music for a second, because that’s where its role is most clearly defined. It also serves as a perfect illustration of what it’s really good at doing.

The pedal steel is called a guitar, but it really has a very different role than a regular guitar. With a regular guitar, you can be part of the rhythm section, you can just strum along and be part of the, you know, really almost part of the drum kit, hanging out with the high hat, especially very friendly with an acoustic guitar, or any kind of strummed instrument.

You don’t really strum the pedal steel, it’s just not how it works. It’s a very declarative instrument, you’ve got to decide what you’re going to play when you going to play it, and you don’t want to be playing all the time. You want to make sure not to step on the vocalist, but you also want to try to answer or compliment the things the vocalist is doing.

Another classic use it would be to kick off a song, very common to kick off and end a song, and also to introduce sections within a song in an interesting way. So you could have heard something like . . . vocalist commences here, you get the general idea. Simple intro, one, five, and one, and then back to one, and the singer starts. Okay, so you can just stop right there for awhile, let the singer sing, his generic milament . . . my dog left me, I’m so sad and blue, and now what I’m going to do with this song is up to you baby. So there you see, you’re playing between the vocal and the vocal, you’re trying to avoid, set him up, set her up for his next moment, get out of his way, but allude to the shape of the song. Especially useful if you’re going toward the four chord, for example . . . I’m just sitting here playing this song. Aha, so what did we do there, we just did like a seventh chord, which just wants desperately to go to the four, and it just as sure as could be that you feel the tug, that that’s where it wants to go.

So those types of things work really well with pedal steel, taking advantage of changes in chords because it is so perfectly suited at changing chords in a very fluid and fascinating way, that’s what the steel works really, really well for. Also ending legs, I mean who hasn’t heard . . . there you go, what more could you ask for, right? So the sky’s the limit, really. You can play any kind of music, I’d say not confined to country music at all. You can play jazz, you can play swing, you can play the hardest rock you want, it’s a polyphonic instrument, it works in every key. There is absolutely no obstacle except your imagination, and really it’s timely for it to be heard in other kinds of music because it’s a musical instrument on its own and it doesn’t need country music as its sole reason for being. Good luck finding your way.

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Minor scales, slightly more complicated than major scales but you can still, of course, do them. In the root position, you’re going to hit the eighth string, the seventh string, the sixth string which has already been lowered because you’ve got your right knee going left, lowering it a whole stet and then releasing it.

Now, after you’ve released it, then you hit the fifth string open. You hit the A pedal for the next, then the second string, and then the fourth string. Again, you’re playing a little bit both ends off the middle, reaching up for the second string and then coming back to the fourth string. That’s one.

Now here’s another possibility based on the minor chord you get when you’re three frets above the root with the A pedal down. Okay, so in that case if it’s just a fragment… This is probably more likely what you’re going to play, since you’re not going to probably be playing a whole lot of complete scales of any kind in any case. People rarely do.

But certainly parts of them are crucial, like this. Like that, so that would be pedal down on the fifth string, reach for the second string. Then your thumb hits on the fourth string, then your second finger reaches for the first string, and then your thumb hits the third string. Again, a perfect example of the kind of exercises you’re going to want to be doing to get used to the fact that the third string is the highest one, which is a little confusing.

Reaching up to go down, which is what’s happening when you’re reaching for the first and second strings, they’re lower than the third, so it’s a little weird. But it is one of the brilliant things about this instrument that it makes a lot of sense design-wise in terms of your access to higher strings. Minor scales.

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Major scales, well the pedals will help you fill in the notes that you’re lacking in the major scale, given this that you have this instrument in open tuning, E ninth chromatic. So the simplest way to approach it is to start on the eighth string, which is going to be your root wherever you happen to be, it’s going to be the root of the chord that’s being formed on that thread in the open position.

So let’s start on G, and you would… So that eight, seven, six, B pedal on the six, open fifth string, pedal on the same thing. Now here you have the choice, you can lower the E string and then release it for the major seventh to the root, and finish the scale. Or you can reach up to the second string, which is already the major seventh, so it can be… And so that last bit would be fifth string, engage the pedal, reach up to the second string, and then hit the fourth string.

Otherwise, lower the E, release it, that’s one major scale. Then you would be in the other main position you would be adopting, A and B pedals down, you’re going to have the pedals down, you hit the sixth string, then you hit the fifth string open, engage the A pedal. Then you reach for the second string, but you’re going to have it pre-lowered a half-step, okay, you’re going to go where the field stop as for the half-step. And then you come back down for the fourth string. So six, open five, A pedal five, second string lowered, fourth string open, first string, third string open, third string pedal.

his is a perfect illustration. By the way, we have not yet pointed out that the pedal steel, the third string is the highest one of the bunch, the tuning is… Why is that? Well because some guy, probably Buddy Emmons, figured out that it was easier to play scale things if you were going back and forth and working toward the center, or a little bit, not exactly the center, but working toward a center point on a given thread, as opposed to working constantly higher and higher and higher, both going horizontally and also up the neck.

So this is an example of how you’re basically playing both ends off the middle, and that is a perfect example of what pedal steel can do really well, and how it sounds can integrate scales in a smooth and fluid kind of way. There’s million of scales available on this, these are just two of them, but there you are, major scales.

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Okay, finally now, how about augmented chords? Now, as I already described, the diminished chords were sort of when you squashed the chord down by flatting the third and flatting the fifth, reducing the distance between the root and the fifth. Augmented chords work in the opposite way. You start with a major interval, your root to the major third, and you add another one by augmenting, by raising the fifth.

So the simplest way to do that is to, exceptionally, usually you’re going to strike your pedals full on, but in this case you just need a half climb on the A pedal. And the easiest way to do that is just simply to tease it just a little bit, not all the way, which is taking you all the way to sixth, you want the sharp five. So this requires just a little control. And that’s your augmented chord. So this is your G. Your G augmented chord.

Another available way to do it, on the A and B frets, on the A, B pedals on the tenth fret where you have another G as you know, and B pedals down. Okay so our fifth is D. But, it’s on the E string here, so what we’re going to do is raise that with our F lever, and sure enough, and there’s another augmented chord. Certainly suitable for all the uses you’re going to have. And so those are a couple of augmented chords to get you started.

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Okay, diminished chords. Now, as you probably know already, a diminished chord occurs when you’ve got a minor chord where the fifths have been also flatted and a dominant seventh has also been flatted. Right there you’ve got four notes. You’ve got three picks. You probably may or may not to actually even play four notes but you can certainty make an elude to that sound without any problem.

The main issue is first to get, at the very least, the root, the minor third and the flatted five which is a half-diminished chord. That’s going to convey a lot of what you need. In a sense, if you’re talking about a diminished chord it’s almost like it’s been sort of compressed, because you’ve got the minor interval for the third. Normally you’d have a major interval between the third and the fifth. But, that’s been compressed too. So the distance between the root and the fifth is smaller. Sort of a diminished sized chord, if you like.

One of the easier ways to do it is to raise the E if you’re in a G position. The typical feel of a diminished chord that would be likely to be heard would be a situation where you have a G chord, a G sharp diminished, an A minor chord and then a D seventh chord. It’s just going to sound like this. [plays guitar]

A very classic kind of of jazzy-ish progression. And all I did there to achieve the G sharp diminished chord was raise the G note a half-step with my F lever. You’ve got G sharp and still you have B and D. That is well on the way toward a diminished chord, and if everybody else is doing their job it will sound just fine.

So, again, that little passage just for fun, because it is fun. That’s an A minor cord I’m doing with the information provided earlier. Lowering the G. Lowering the six string, the G sharp string a whole step and then splitting it by putting the D pedal down. That gives you an A minor. Then you go back to the D seven that you would get by having the D pedal down and the E lower.

You can play that forever and ever. It’s the foundation for hundreds and hundreds of songs.

Another version of the diminished on the other principle of the form you’re going to use is the A and B pedals down. What do you need? You need a minor. We’ve already discussed the split available with the B vertical lever, which we’re going to lower. Now what’s left? We need to lower that E. Well, how do we lower the E? We lower it with an E lever. It’s slightly awkward but you’ve got A and B down. You’re pressing against the D lower vertical. In other words your knee is going straight up. And in addition to going straight up, it’s going a little to the right so that you can lower the E.

Now in this case, if you want a G sharp and do the same progression that we did before, you’re going to go up a fret because that’s the G sharp fret. And so you go. Here’s a minor that you’re doing which is just lowering the E on the F 13 fret. Then you go up to the G fret and you still have your E lowered and you engage the B pedal to make a D seventh.

There you go. That’s uses and creation of a diminished chord.

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How to play sixth chords. Basically you can use the A pedal. In a G chord, the sixth note is the E. So you just get that by hitting the A pedal. Another possible sixth chord is two frets below the A and B positions. These are going to be your main positions in general with major chords, probably, is going to be the root where everything’s open, and the A and B position. That’s going to be on the D fret in the case of G. So instead of having your major chord A and B pedal, go down two frets and lower the E. Now this is also a minor chord, but again, as I said, it depends what the bass player’s doing, what the rest of the band is doing. If everybody else is playing G, when you’re doing that it’s going to sound like a sixth chord and not like an A minor chord, which it also is. So that’s it for sixth chords.

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Seventh chords. Okay, so these are dominant seventh chords, the kind you need when you’re playing in a one-four-five progression when you’re at the five, that’s always going to be a dominant seventh chord. It’s a very strong chord, it’s used to, very strong pull back to the root chord.

You have several ways of playing it. We’ll start in G here. First of all the second string can be lowered a half step, and when it’s not lowered it’s a major seventh, which means it’s the leading tone to the root of the scale. What you want, however, is the dominant seventh, which is a whole step lower, not a half step lower from the root. And since we are a half step away from the root, we’ll lower this a half step with your right knee lever going right, and you’ll feel the half stop as it goes to the seventh. So if you have . . . you can play Wooly Bully.

Anyway, you’ve also got a nice seventh in the base on the ninth string. This is the D, so you know without doing anything to it, just an open position, it’s got a nice jazzy quality to it because of being in the base there, it’s going… You’re pressing the A pedal there, but anyway that’s the seventh right there too, that would be an F note against the G, which makes it a seventh.

Okay, let’s go back up three frets to our familiar place that we’ve already figured out for major chords with the A pedal and the F levering gauge. In this case we’re going to release the A pedal this time instead of any lever. There is that friendly note. So three frets higher, just F lever raised, that’s a seventh chord there. Two frets higher than that, if you lower the E and have the B pedal engaged, that’s also a G seventh. Again, these are available in all of the same voicings that we discussed in major chords, ten-eight-six, eight-six-five, five-four-three, six-five-four . . . et cetera.

Okay, now because you’re playing only three notes, what the rest of the band is doing has a huge effect on what sound you’re actually going to make. So this is kind of the freedom of the instrument in a way, is that you’ve got a lot of things that are going to apply in more than one situation. It’s just a question of knowing, you know, where you are and what you want to use at a given time. That covers it for seventh chords.

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Okay, how to play minor chords. Well as you probably know, a minor chord is just a major chord with a third lower, so if you have, one- three-five-three-one. Okay, so you need to lower the third half step. In this case basically I’m just lowering the six string, and I’m pressing the B pedal to achieve a split we’ve discussed before. So since it lowers the third a whole step, and then the pedal raises it a half step, you’ve just lowered it a half step, which is exactly what you want.

So in a root position, a good minor chord is eight string, six string lower with the B pedal activated, so you’re hitting on eight, six, and five voicing. The six, five, and four is also acceptable, you can’t go any further than that, because then you get some unfriendly notes, but those are both good. And also the ten, eight, and six voicing. It’s sometimes disorienting if you’re looking, you know, what I’ve just, the little singing thing I did, the one-three-five-three-one, it doesn’t necessarily happen in that sequence. Here you’ve got one-three-five-three-one, so don’t be, you know, the lowest note is not always going to be the root.

The next minor chord you’re going to find is, you probably remember, three threads over the root if you have the A pedal and the F lever engaged, you got a major chord, G major. Okay, well so, do our little diagnostic, and how do we lower the third? Oh well, we just, since we have the E raised to the F lever, we’ll just not raise that, and sure enough we have a minor chord. Okay, G minor.

Now moving up some more, you have your A and B pedals down on the D fret, in other words the 10th fret, that’s a G major. Now we have another split. You have a B lever, you should have if you’ve got a good guitar, and the B lever is a vertical lever, which means it’s under the, it’s between the two levers on the left-hand side. But it goes up. So you just raise your knee, you’ve got, which is easy because you’re pressing down on the pedals anyway, so you just sort of arc it, and that lowers the B string a half step. And since you’ve raised the string a whole step for the major, and because of the split, this actually will lower that a half step to give you a minor.

Okay, so recapping we’ve got . . . could be a little better in tune, but you get the drift. The final minor chord that’s the most common is using the B and C pedals two frets below the root position. So if you’re in G, that means you go two frets down to the F fret, and press the B and C pedals. It’s good with a six-five-four and the five-four-three positions, and this is also got a sort of a nice low quality there as we’ve discussed before, the B and C pedals. Those are the primary minor chord positions.

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Okay, how to play major chords. Well, you’ve got different positions that are available to you in several different ways. Because you’ve got ten strings, you’ve got quite a lot of horizontal action going on here. Starting with the tenth string, you can have a grip that’s, a grip is basically a hand position and the combination of strings involved. So there are numerous grips that will give you all the same major chord of E. You’re in E when you start here. It’s the ninth climatic tuning.

So, you’ve got four different E triads right out of the gate. You’ve got ten, eight and six. You’ve got eight, six and five; six, five and four; and five, four and three. Okay? So that’s just without anything. That’s without using the tone bar, without using needle levers, or anything. Now, we’ll use the key of G as an example. So not only do you have the four major chords we just described, but moving upward if you have the A pedal engaged and the F lever engaged, that’s the first needle lever here on your left, raising the E’s. Go up three frets from the G, and that’s another G major. So you have a G major here on the third fret. You have a G major here on the sixth fret.

Now, if you bring your knees together, lower the E and lower the G sharp… A nice sound there, huh? That’s a G also. So let’s see what we’ve got. Then two frets higher than that on the D fret, A and B pedals down, it’s the fourth of D, so the fourth of D is G, just as the fourth of E is A. The same thing applies higher up. So let’s see. All right, that’s not bad, and then all the way up again to the then 15th fret is going to be your next G chord.

So that’s already quite a lot of G stuff going on. Now, we’ve only touched upon those voicings of the six, five and four variety. So, I mean, this all applies. That’s your ten, eight, six voicing. That’s your eight, six and five voicing. That’s your six, five and four voicing, and that’s your five, four and three voicing. Now, you can use all sorts of combinations. You could do eight and three and four if you wanted. You can use six, five and three. It’s purely a matter of the kinds of sounds you want to get, and where you’re coming from and where you’re headed to. Those are the basic major chords.

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How to play double stops. Well, you basically play two notes at a time, and whatever combination that is, is entirely up to you. You can keep them close together, or further apart, then combinations thereof. So, really, it’s just a matter of using your two fingers together or a thumb and a finger. Generally speaking, when you’re going to be playing you’re going to be using your thumb and your second finger at the most.

The first finger is going to drop in occasionally, as needed. But when you’re doing a lot of picking stuff, if you’ve got a choice between the two, go for the second one. You’ve got a little bit more space to work with. You’re going to be less likely to get jammed up because of the proximity of the first finger and the thumb. But, I mean, with a ten-string instrument you have limitless possibilities for double stops, or really pretty much any kind of stops.

So those are just some examples of what you can do. Again, you can engage a pedal leading into it as with E lower to kick things off. It’s always good with pedal steel to give the impression that you’re coming from somewhere and going somewhere, too. You don’t want to be just… This is kind of static. It’s a lot less interesting than… which is reaching the same result but something happened. You went from point A to point B, and that applies to anything you’re going to do.

That’s the kind of thing you want to be hearing. You don’t want to sound like you’re just dragging from one place to the next in sort of a rigid way. So, that’s it for double stops.

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Okay, how do you play single notes? It’s a little self-evident that you strike the strings with your picks and you make notes, but you want to strike them cleanly. The thumb goes forward, the fingers come toward you. You don’t strum. Pedal steel is not a strumming situation the way a guitar is. It’s a very declarative instrument. You have to know in advance what you’re going to play and when, and you probably shouldn’t be playing the whole time anyway. You need to strike the strings cleanly.

Now, the beauty of the pedal steel is that you don’t have to strike every single note, because that’s what the pedals are for. Pretty much every other note or so, you played, you struck once and you got three notes. That’s pretty good. The same applies for sliding. I don’t know how many notes we got there with only one strike, but you’re starting to get the idea. That’s what lends to the fluidity and the originality of this instrument. The pedals are there to do some of the work for you and will fill in some notes. It gives you the time to get to the next position. That’s how you have this wonderful…

Sp you’re doing combinations of strings, you’re doing single note stuff. Basically, you’re going to want to find some exercises that encourage you to follow certain rolls and stuff, sort of banjo roll type things, or you’re doing series of rolling motions that’s sort of like a bluegrassy kind of feel. You’re going to be using your tone bar to slide around and make extra notes as well. So a combination of picking, using the pedals, and sliding is how you’re going to get your single note and any other kind of note happening with this instrument.

You need to block a little bit, as I mentioned before. You don’t want everything to bleed into everything else. I use a pick blocking where the pick comes back down to rest on the string after you’ve struck it. So it rings, but not any longer than it has to. If you’re playing fast, especially, it’s a desirable way to keep the notes distinct and neat and try to make it sound really polished and smooth. That’s basically how you would start picking single notes on a pedal steel guitar.

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Okay. What are splits? Well, splits are something that you have available to you when you’re working on the same string in different ways.

A perfect example is if I’m raising the B string with my A pedal I’m raising it a whole step. If I’m looking to get just halfway there the best way to do that is to keep my foot on the A pedal and reach up for what we call the B lever. Which is the B lower and that’s a vertical lever which means it’s going across here not on either side of my leg. So, I just raise my knee up so you can hear that it’s splitting the difference, hence the name split.

This is especially useful for making minor chords out of A and B position chords. If we’re in the key of G on the tenth fret so then we have a minor chord on the same fret. If we want a G seventh chord we have the same relationship occurring with the sixth string which is affected by the B pedal. It raises it a half step. Now, the right knee going left lowers the sixth string a whole step.

So, once again, you’re splitting the difference. You lower it a whole step, then you engage the pedal that raises it a half step. So, you’ve ended up lowering it only a half step to get the note you want. In this case you get a nice seventh chord by engaging the A and B and lowering the sixth.

So that’s what splits are. It’s basically the combination of two pedals that are working in opposite ways finding a happy medium that’s yet another option for you.

This is not an option available to people who own push-pull pedal steel guitars. That technology did not permit splits, and basically whatever the first change you hit that was the one that won. If you added the other one that would countermand it or modify that you were out of luck. Nothing was going to happen.

But that’s one of the advantages of all-pull guitars is that you do have splits and they can be extremely useful.

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How do you use the knee levers on a pedal steel guitar? Well, you use them in the same way that you use the pedals, basically because they change, as the pedals do,they change pitch of the strings. So it’s a question of understanding what role these various alterations can play and how best to use them.

The first knee lever you use is the E-raise, and when used in combination with an A pedal, this gives you a major chord. It gives you a major chord three frets above the root position, so since we’re in an E tuning, open is E and third fret is G. Now three fret’s higher than that, as I just said.

If I have the A pedal engaged and the F-lever as it’s called, because it raises the E’s from E to F. That’s a G chord again, a G major chord. An E lowers, a common application if you were in G again, if your were playing at the top of a blues progression the D chord in a 1-4-5, G-C-D progression. A D 7th is available by lowering the E’s and keeping your foot on the B pedal.

Now a lot of times with the lower especially, you can get some nice effects just by, sort of like throwing that at the beginning of something, instead of you could also do a climb with your tone bar, but both of those notes are being involved whereas here it’s just the E. And you can, when you’re in the the position we just discussed, three frets higher on the G chord.

If you’ve got your A pedal engaged and your F lever engaged, you can release the F lever, reach down and lower it. Come back up to a neutral place, so you’ve got three sounds with this string. That’s pretty happening. The next knee lever that you can use is the six string lower and first and second string raise. There you can get some unison’s. So there I’m just raising the F sharp to G sharp. Got a nice unison.

Likewise, your getting a unison on the second string, from D sharp to E. Now this second string, the way I have set it up this is, not every guitar has this change on it, but it’s pretty popular nonetheless and it’s really a nice change to have. I highly recommend it. This string has probably the most options of any, because you not only have raising it a half step.

You’ve got the open position, you’ve got your half step lower and a full step lower, so that’s four notes that you have, just on the second string. So that’s a very pleasant sound to have and the combinations are limitless. Now the last knee lever is going right, and that lowers the second string a half step and again a whole step, and there’s something called the feel stop, when the second string meets the ninth string note, there a half-step apart.

So you’ve got this horrible discordant sound. But then it settles into unison and together they go down, yet another step. So that’s basically, the sky’s the limit. You can use it in single note iterations or you can use it in chords. This is one of my favorite licks.

By lowering and just raising and releasing, get these really nice sounds. So quarterly and single string-wise, there’s just tons of stuff you can do with the knee levers, and in combination with the pedals, it’s pretty much infinite. So that’s scratching the surface on what the knee levers do.

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The volume pedal; the old timers called it the expression pedal, which is
an interesting way of looking at it. Of course, what it basically does is
raise and lower your volume level. It’s no secret. It’s just like the
volume control on a guitar or on your radio, if you still have one of
those.

But, what it allows you to do with a pedestal is prolong the presence of a
note as it’s decaying and it also gives you a, sort of, mysterious, sort
of, creeping sound. And, you’ll see I’m bringing up the volume as the note
decays, so as to try to keep as steady a sound as possible and as long a
sound and to cultivate that hovering, airy sound that we love so much that
this instrument can provide.

A good exercise to try is to hit notes and to keep the note at the same
level as long as possible by increasing the volume as the note decays. You
can do exercises like this. It will start to give you a sense of how to
approach it. It is not a rhythm situation.

You don’t want to be pumping away like that. It’s not a calliope. I had
found this to be one of the more difficult parts of the pedestal guitar,
interestingly. Even though it, sort of, technically, it has nothing to do
with the instrument itself.

Getting control of your volume pedal, not fluctuating wildly, not having
sudden surges of volume, this is a pretty crafty thing to work on and it’s
not easy. But, basically, it just gives you another means of expanding the
life of the note and, also you know, there’s just different, sort of, you
know, expression strategies, in terms of how you want the note to unfold.

Try not to over use it. You know, it’s still something that I’m still
coming to grips with. It has a huge effect on the sound of the instrument
and it’s something that needs attention in its own right. But, that’s
basically it. That’s what you would do with a volume pedal.

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The C pedal. This is easily the least used of the pedals but it has its own special qualities. Especially in combination with the B pedal.

By itself you hear it, it will raise the B and E pedals each a whole step. So by itself you can give it a nice, it’s sort of, it’s kind of a little suspension feeling.

Now you can tell a little dissonance there. I mean, it’s a little salty but it’s cool. Most commonly though you will use it in combination with the B pedal, in which case you’ve got a minor.

Lends itself to those sort of chattery kinds of pedal steel things that you’ve been dreaming about.

Anyway basically its most common use is going to be with the B pedal and it will give you a minor cord, two frets below the root that you want to make minor.

So if I want an A minor, I go down two frets to G and press the B and C pedals. Okay. Those are all minor cords. And there you have it.

So, that’s it for the C pedal.

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The A and B pedals together are probably the most characteristic sound of pedal steel guitar. That’s pretty much where it lives, isn’t it? And so all you’re doing is the A pedal, is raising the B note to a C sharp while the B pedal raises the G sharp note to an A. Now, if you do those things together and you start with an E chord, when you hit them together, it becomes an A. Now, as is the case with a lot of these things, these positions are good in all of the grips that are available to you in the major chord. So, we’ve got 10-8-6. We’ve got 8-6-5. We’ve got 6-5-4. We’ve got 4-5-3. I mean, 5-4-3. You can also play one or both ends off the middle, especially by releasing the A pedal and keeping the B pedal down. You can also do the opposite. Stay on the A, and so on and so forth. Anyway, that’s what your A and B pedals do. They give you, together, the fourth of whatever it is, the root that you’re on. So, if you’re in the G fret, the fourth is going to be C. If you’re in A, the fourth is going to be D. If you’re in C, the fourth is going to be F, and so on and so forth. That’s it for the A and B’s.

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The B pedal. Okay. What is it and why?

The B pedal raises the G sharp string a half step. So, it goes from G sharp to A. And by itself basically it creates a suspended chord.

Suspended because as the name indicates it really, really wants to go back to where it started. It wants to go back to the G chord and it’s half way toward a C chord.

It’s basically giving you half of the full C chord. And the way to get the other half is to engage the A pedal along with the B pedal.

So, there you get a full four chord against the (?). But by itself very nice hovery sound. That’s basically what it’s good for. Mostly in combination with other things but certainly legitimate for its suspension purposes.

As I said to get the full fourth. The A and B together will give you the forth of the whatever root fret you happen to be on. In this case if you’re in G it’s C.

The other opportunity to use it would be with the C pedal. In which case it will give you a minor chord. So, here I’m in G and if I press the B and C pedals it gives me an A minor.

If you lower the Es and you engage the B pedal you get a really nice seventh chord that is going to be the seventh of the A and B position two frets higher. It sounds confusing but it’s not. Let’s just look carefully.

G. Okay? The fifth position A and B is the fifth chord, dominant fifth. It’s going to be two frets higher with the A and B down.

Now you want a seventh chord, really, to have the full value of the dominate chord. So, one of the easiest ways to do that without even leaving the G fret is to lower the Es and to press the B pedal.

So you’ve got a progression that could go. I’m pumping the A pedal but I’m just sticking with the positions I was talking about.

At first we had suspension. Then we went all the way to the fourth. Then we went to the dominant to the five chord, dominant seventh. Then we release everything and we’re back to G.

Okay. That’s the B pedal.

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How to use the A pedal. The question is well of course to use the A pedal you strike the A pedal.

It raises the B strings. In other words the fifth and the tenths strings. The question of course is what do you get when you do that? All right?

Well, you get a couple of different things. If you’re playing in G let’s say for example. If you engage the A pedal you’ve got and you play the six, five, four strings you’ve got an E minor chord.

This is your root. That’s E. E minor chord presto. Okay?

It’s also, it’s by hitting the that creates the sixth scale tone in the scale of the root position you’re in. So, in this case it gives you an E. And that happens to be the sixth of the G scale.

So, this is also an acceptable sixth chord. It all depends what’s happening in the bass. To which I’ll prove that by saying that if you change the bass note to an A and you kept these top two notes which is a perfect minor interval. One, three.

I mean that’s a minor interval, no mistaking it. And if you hear the E to go with it, that is an E minor sound.

What if you had though an A note. That’s your A. Oh, well that’s not minor at all. Suddenly you’ve got an A seventh chord. And you’ve got all those notes.

That’s a seventh. That’s a seventh. Okay. So, that gives you it’s going to be the seventh of whatever chord is two frets above wherever you happen to be.

In this case we’re on the G fret so it’s an A seventh chord. So it’s an A seventh chord. It’s an E minor chord. It’s a G sixth chord.

So what the bass player’s doing, what the rest of the band is doing is going to have a huge effect on any of these things.

But that’s what happen when you use the A pedal.

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Okay, now, about tuning the knee levers. As we discussed previously with the pedals, everything goes on over here when it comes to tuning the things that change the pitch of the strings. So, in this case, we’ve got five knee levers, and the first one we’re going to work on is the one affecting raising the E strings.

Okay, you’ve got two E strings, and this left knee lever going left raises them to F. Now here’s the big shocker about this whole kind of temperament situation. You’re E’s are 442 1/2. Your F’s are going to be 435 1/2. That’s a huge, that seven cents difference. It just happens to be that if you tuned the F to 440, it would sound bad. And this is the compromise, the temperament compromise that we make, and it sounds pretty good, so that using a combination of the A pedal and the E lever, you have a, if you’re playing a G chord [plays guitar], move up three frets, raise the E to F, and engage the A pedal [plays guitar], so that sounds fine. And that is at 435 1/2.

So, let’s just make sure that we actually do have that. My E is coming in just a tiny bit sharp. Yeah, 442 1/2, okay, that’s good. All right. The E lever is engaged. All right. It’s actually a tiny bit sharp. Now, remember what I told you, that these things, when you increase the effect of something, you’re not necessarily going higher, you’re not raising anything. You’re increasing the amount of effect that the pedal has.

So, in this particular case, you are raising the string, and you just want less of that effect to occur. So we’re going to lower this a little bit. These increments are subtle, and you should never do a whole 360, I mean, that should have a very very significant effect. Okay, just this very slight tweeze I did is giving us the 435 1/2 that we want. And we’re going to go now, while we’re at it, to the low E, because it has the same effect. And we want the same result, and you want it to be 435 1/2. And there we go. Okay. So that’s the F, that’s the E to F, this is called the F lever, because that’s what it does.

The next lever over here is going to lower the strings. So the first thing we’ve run into that actually has a lowering effect. And this is going to lower the Es to D sharp. So, because we want to increase the lowering effect we are going to go clockwise, because we’re sharp. And this D sharp should be, actually, no, actually, it’s exactly right on the money. It’s just ever so slightly… No, it’s fine. Now let’s see what happened. Okay, this one is also perfect.

So, the next knee lever is the, this is the effect several strings. So it has several different roles. The first thing is does is lower your sixth string a whole step. So, our sixth string is supposed to be around 439, and that’s exactly where it is. So, now, if we lower it, this chart actually does not have a feature for this, so I’m just sort of basically tuning it to the next string, which is a whole step down, G sharp down to F sharp. Hey, we have an F sharp right here. Got a pretty respectable unison going on here. So that works for me. Another thing you want to keep in mind is that this last knee lever is the right knee lever going right. And this has an effect on the second and ninth strings. It’s a rather unusual arrangement, the second string is the first to experience a change. And it goes down to D. But what you can also do if you just keep going, both strings go down to a C sharp. So, the first half of the trip is done only by the second string as it meets the ninth string. You start with this very discordant half step interval, suddenly they’re in unison, and you keep going if you need to, and go all the way down.

That pretty much handles the tuning of the knee levers and, again, there’s different tuning approaches, your ear is going to be your guide, ultimately. But this is according to the Newman chart, and it works for me.

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Okay, what’s next? The G sharp strings. Okay, there was the third and the sixth so let’s have a look. Okay. This is in tune. And what we want is for it to be at just about 441. So smack dab between the first and second lines, between 440 and 442. There’s no line for 441 but you just look and you figure out which it is.

As I’ve said before harmonics are a good way to zero in on exactly what you’re getting. It’s a slightly less volatile thing and this is now telling me that it’s ever so slightly sharp. These are pretty subtle increments you know. This would happen from normal playing. You’re not going to be way out of tune with the stuff that we’re fixing here. But this is what you are aiming for ideally. And it’s ever so slightly sharp. Again, I’m lowering it to reduce the amount of whatever it is that is being done.

The third pedal affects the fifth and fourth strings and raises them each a whole step. And in that case we have, see pedal chart. So the F sharp is on 439 and a half. So you started with an E note that’s at 442 and a half but when you’re hitting the C pedal you actually are looking for an F sharp note that’s 439 and a half.

Now I’m looking at this and you can see that it’s actually not budging at all from 442. So that is not desireable. We want to lower it a little bit so we want the pedal to do less of that. We’re going to give it a little more of a twist. And now we’re getting there. Still a little less.

Now this is interesting to note, for example, that this F sharp is at 439 and a half. The first string is an F sharp and it’s at 441 and a half. So again, it’s just a matter of in context it was determined by Jeff Newman that this sounded better than ever so slightly sharper F sharp at the very top which in its role sounds better ever so slightly sharp.

I mean you’re pretty close. Here we go. We’re still just a tiny bit sharp. But you have these together. Well, if you can hear the difference, it’s pretty subtle. So again, it’s just these little subtle increments that are really based on the context of where you’re using this particular move.

Okay now we have the B string is on 442. We’re going to hit the pedal and we want this to be at 438 and a half. Okay, again significantly lower than where it is right now so we’re going to, be careful, make sure you look which of these is moving. There’s two side-by-side and they’re moving so don’t do the wrong one. Otherwise you’ll just drive yourself crazy by tuning the wrong thing.

Okay, again, there’s too much tension going on, too much tightening. So I’m going to loosen it up a bit. Okay, here we go. Okay, that’s a nice minor chord you get with the B and C together. That’s how you tune, according to the Jeff Newman system that’s how you tune your pedals.

Transcript

How do you tune the pedals? Okay, well what we have here is the tuning mechanism for the pedals and the knee levers. We’ve already discussed how to tune the strings. That’s over here. You use the tuning pegs to tune the strings to the tunings that we’ve previously discussed and that gives you your open string tunings. That’s all sounding pretty good. Now, what this does is to affect how much effect the pedals and knee levers have on the strings in terms of raising or lowering them. And what you have here is a little three sixteenth socket wrench that fits these little hex things and they allow you to raise or lower, or increase or decrease I should say, the amount of effect that a pedal or knee lever has on a string. So that’s the thing to keep in mind is that you’re not necessarily talking about raising when you’re increasing. It’s just going to make the pedal or knee lever do more of the task that you’re asking it to do. So let’s look at for example, the very first pedal that we have, the A pedal.

I’m going to turn on the tuner here, we’re going to see the tuner is telling me that we’re in tune. The B string is in tune with my chart and we want to make sure that we are getting a C sharp note that is 438 and a half. This is actually pretty close. It’s just ever so slightly sharp. So as I said, since this affects the degree to which something is happening, and what’s happening in this case is the string is being raised, we have a little tiny bit more than we want so we’re going to go counter clockwise just a very little amount. These are quite sensitive and there we go. That’s actually pretty much right on the money. Let’s just do a tiny, tiny bit less. Okay, that’s pretty good.

Now, we have the low B, it’s in tune too. That’s actually a little flat. So we’re going to raise that. Now, you need to pay attention to what’s moving so that you don’t suddenly start tuning the wrong hex nut thing. You want to, so this is fairly clear that this is the last and the lowest string.

There’s not a lot of competition around here and it’s the only thing moving when you press the pedal so that’s how you know. Okay, so since this is a little flat, we want the pedal to do more of that. And so we will then go clockwise. And there you go. Okay, so that was the A pedal. You’ve tuned your B strings.