Hello fans and fellow players,
A player who asked to remain anonymous sent me this email.
Bobbe,
You mention tone many times in your newsletters and I am amazed at how many people miss the point. They confuse tone and pitch thinking they are one and the same when actually they are two different dimensions of sound.
Let me explain tone the way most people comprehend it. Elvis had a good sounding voice. The tone of his recorded voice is very pleasing to the ear, especially to female ears. Gilbert Gottfried has bad tone. Gilbert could sing any Elvis song in tune and still sound like fingernails on chalkboard.
Now contrast that to pitch. Leann Rimes has excellent pitch. She sings notes that are exact matches of what you’d get playing a piano. She sings the “keys” as we say in the studios of Nashville. Roseanne Barr has terrible pitch. We say she sings the “cracks” meaning she hits somewhere between the piano keys. She has a key all of her own and it’s unknown to the rest of the world. She sings “off key”.
When we talk about the tone of a steel guitar we’re talking about the quality of the timbre and how pleasing the sound is to the ear.
When we tell someone a certain steel guitar doesn’t have good tone and they tell us to get a tuner and tune the thing, I know they don’t have a clue about the difference between tone and pitch.
If a guitar is out of tune it is easily corrected by tuning. If a guitar doesn’t have a good tone, no amount of tuning will correct it. If you think this will help clue in some of the clueless, go ahead and print it. Just don’t use my name.
Well my reply to these comments is somewhat unnecessary as you’ve taken care of it yourself the way you explained it.
I’ll go into it a little deeper. Gilbert Gottfried not only has bad tone, but his pitch is bad also. However he could do it and have you laughing about all the way through.
When we talk about steel guitar tone we are talking about the beauty in the sound of the note and how pleasing the sound is to the ear. Like you say, if the guitar is out of tune, it is easily corrected by tuning. I f the guitar has bad tone, it’s true that no amount of tuning will correct it. No amount of adjusting the tuning will help the tone of a steel guitar.
Country music to me is Hank Williams, Faron Young, George Morgan and so many of these great singers from the late forties into the mid sixties. The standard that kicked off the great days of country music was Hank Williams himself. We just lost the last member of Hank’s band a short time ago and this gentleman, Don Helms, was a steel guitar player and quite a legend himself.
Don used to come to my store here in Hendersonville several times a month during his last days of life. We would talk for hours about some of the last legends of country music. I would ask him about the road travel in those days during the late forties and into the early fifties.
Because of his life on the road and as involved as he was with other legends like Patsy Cline, Ray Price and so on, he never seemed to run out of great stories. I loved Don like the steel guitar brother that he was.
Before I left my hometown on the east coast in the early fifties, I talked to Don about his cars, motels he had to stay in, other band members and sometimes even Hank himself. Don always made the story interesting and full of humor.
I told him about stories I had heard from Pete Wade’s father and sister. Pete’s sister Shirley told us about her brother Pete that is now a very famous Nashville musician, racing his ’56 Oldsmobile against Don’s 55 Cadillac. Don said Pete’s Oldsmobile may have been a little faster, but the Cadillac had the Olds beat for comfort and still had tremendous power.
I told Don, I said, “Don, I can see you and Pete out there racing in my mind and having a great time doing it.”
Don said it’s a shame Hank couldn’t have lived just a little longer because the Cadillac’s got a little faster after that first one he had. Hank’s car was a powder blue ’52 convertible. These cars are a little rich for my blood now, however for $40,000 to $80,000, you should be able to pick one up.
Don related to me that the first year of the really good Cadillac’s was 1953. It was the first year of the 12 volt battery system, first year for GM air conditioning and a good boost in horsepower because of the 331 cubic inch V-8 which took the car from 190 to 210 brake horsepower.
The cars were very dependable depending on the wiring. The Fleetwood model was by far the most luxurious. Don had a late model ’55 Coupe DeVille. As long as you could keep liquids in the Cadillac like STP, octane booster and Marvel Mystery Oil, the car would pretty well go forever. And a bottle of Jack Daniels in the trunk never hurt anything as Hank was known to do.
Don told me many times that the only reason Hank kept him in the band was to keep him drinking. Don was quite a character and I’m sure his stint playing steel with Ray Price along with the thousands of miles he did with Hank Sr. was what made him the highly loved steel player that he was.
Don told me the old Cadillac could get 13.7 miles per gallon on those old two lane highways on a good day as long as there weren’t too many towns to go through.
I asked, “How did you sleep in that car on long trips Don?”
Don said it was about the only place he could sleep after he’d been on the road so many years. He said if he could buy one now, convertible or four door, he’d park it behind his house and use it for an extra room.
Don said he saw the papers on Hank’s Cadillac which is now owned by Hank Jr. and saw that Hank paid $5200 for the car, plus insurance and financing. He got a bank loan for $3818. and agreed to pay $212 per month for 18 months.
Because this newsletter is so long right now, I’m going to cut it off. However if you want to hear more about it, let me know.
Check out our monthly specials at www.steelguitar.net/monthlyspecials.html and we’ll try to save you a lot of money.
The friend of all bar holders,
Bobbe Seymour
www.steelguitar.net
sales@steelguitar.net
www.youtube.com/bobbeseymour
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Hendersonville, TN. 37075
(615) 822-5555
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