Pedal Steel Music

Hello fellow players,

This is Bob Hempker with today’s newsletter.

Today I’d like to talk about the challenges of tuning. I’ve seen and heard the subject greatly debated time after time by steel players for years. There are so many different methods of tuning your instrument. The bottom line is what you play has to sound in tune to you and hopefully in tune with who you’re playing with and whoever is listening to you play.

One virtually overlooked element when it comes to tuning is our ears. It doesn’t matter if we tune tempered, straight up or however. When we don’t use our ears and carefully listen to what we’re playing, chances are we’re going to sound out of tune.

Let’s face it, we play an instrument that lies somewhere between a totally perfect instrument and an imperfect fretted instrument. Let me explain. We don’t have frets like a guitar which would put us the category of a violin, viola, cello, slide trombone etc. But we do have a bar in our left hand that is totally straight.

It’s hard to bend a note into tune that might be in the middle of our chord or the parts we happen to be playing. This takes years and years of work and practice training our ears on how we tune and how we play to perfect our technique.

I’m not going to endorse any particular mode of tuning. What works for one of us may not work for someone else. Again, we have to sound in tune to ourselves to begin with. From there, we want to sound as much in tune as possible to other people.

Electronic tuners are great. I like them because I can tune with my volume pedal backed off and noise going on around me. If you tune strictly by your ears, other sounds around you get blended in with the strings you’re trying to get in tune with each other. That can absolutely drive you insane.

I also use the time between songs while the singer is talking to the audience. I back my volume pedal off to where no one hears me and touch up my tuning with the electronic tuner.

Musical instruments drift in and out of tuning all on their own. Throw in temperature changes, air conditioners, heaters and such kicking on and off and blowing across our instruments and we have a challenge of staying in tune. If you’re playing an outdoor show, it’s even worse.

There are several clubs where the band plays right next to the entrance in order to draw people in from the street. In such circumstances, every time the door opens and closes, your instrument is subject to climate changes. This can play havoc with your tuning.

In a recording studio, the heat and air conditioning kicks on and off just like anywhere else also. And of course, in a recording situation, tuning is very critical. If you’re playing an auditorium or stadium, overhead stage lighting can also affect your tuning because they generate heat and they are constantly turned on and off so the temperature can change rapidly. When the lights are on, sometimes it burns the bald spot on the top of my head. When the turns the lights off you instantly feel the coolness and so does your instrument.

A good analogy on how heat and cold can affect your tuning is to compare the lines on a power pole in cold winter they’re tight and taut. In summer heat they somewhat sag. The strings on a musical instrument are no different. So we need to be prepared. We are going to go out of tune.

You also warm the strings on your instrument with your hands sliding across it so bear in mind you’re not going to stay in tune. You have to touch up your tuning constantly while you’re playing a gig.

Now I would like to address the issues on tuners. I’m not going to recommend any particular brand. I just like to make sure that I can run directly through the tuner straight out of my guitar, then into the volume pedal. In order to do this, we have to experiment with different tuners.

We have to find one that doesn’t change our tone by just running through it. Usually the higher end, more expensive tuners have components in them that eliminate the tuner from having any effect on the tone of our instrument.

Again, I’m not going to recommend tempered tuning or straight up tuning. I have played both ways and I’ve heard other players play both ways. You can sound in tune doing either. Just be sure that you don’t forget to use your ears.

I knew a certain steel guitar player who would set and take at least an hour or longer to tune his instrument with a tuner making sure each and every little note or pedal change was precisely in tune with his tuning chart. But when he would play, he sounded out of tune to me and I have heard other people say the same thing. He wasn’t using his ears.

Playing in tune is more important than being in tune. A good exercise is to deliberately detune some stings on your guitar, then try to play and make it sound in tune while you’re playing. That should provide many hours of entertainment.

Bear in mind the people you’re playing with need to tweak their instrument’s tuning also. I’ve worked with many guitar players and bass players who would tune their instrument before a gig and then never pay a bit of attention to it.

Keep in mind, it may not be you that’s out of tune. It may be somebody else. You have to listen closely. It really drives me crazy when the bass is out of tune because that usually is the foundation of the chord that everybody else is trying to play in tune with.

It’s good to have a gentleman’s agreement with the rest of the band where we can in a tactful, diplomatic manner ask each other, “Hey, could you check your tuning?” It shouldn’t bruise anyone’s ego. If it does, they don’t deserve to be on the stage with you. This is part of being professional.

I want to thank Liam, a customer who purchased a guitar from us a while back who just called in here to ask about tuning. Before he called, we were wondering what topic to use for the newsletter. Thanks Liam.

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Steel Guitar Nashville
123 Mid Town Court
Hendersonville, TN. 37075
(615) 822-5555
Open 9AM – 4PM Monday – Friday
Closed Saturday and Sunday

Hello fans and fellow players,

Today’s newsletter comes from Bob Hempker.

The idea of bands playing instrumentals has somewhat become a thing of the past. Club bands used to play a couple instrumentals every set. They would also have an instrumental they would play for a break song when they were getting ready to take a break. The old big band tune “Intermission Riff” comes to mind. I’ve played in several bands that used that for a break tune.

“Hold It” was another tune that got used a lot for a break tune. Even back on the road with recording artists, the band would get featured for at least one instrumental during the show. None of this seems to be the case anymore. Even club bands I’ve played in during the last several years were all vocalist oriented.

When the front person isn’t singing, the bass player, guitar player, keyboard player or whoever will be featured singing. It seems that nowadays, younger musicians concentrate on learning intros, fills, turn-arounds and endings and don’t get the benefit of being featured on instrumentals.

Strictly instrumental groups like The Ventures, The Harmonicats and Santo & Johnny don’t seem to exist anymore. I’ve wondered why this is. Some possible theories are that the media has elevated vocalists and put them on a pedestal instead of the vocalist being a featured member of the band as they used to be.

You never see groups on American Idol, The Voice or America’s Got Talent. It’s always all about the individual and the individual is a singer, not an instrumentalist. We’ll never see the next Chet Atkins or Buddy Emmons on American Idol. I just don’t see that happening.

I can remember back when I was young working on instrumentals, composing them myself or working on instrumental arrangements of vocal songs. Back then, you had an outlet of getting to play at least one or two instrumentals on your normal gig.

A guitar player and I used to work for hours at a time working out parts to use on instrumentals. Where are the bands behind recording artists in this day and age like Bob Wills’ Texas Playboys, Ernest Tubbs’ Texas Troubadours or Hank Thompson’s Brazos Valley Boys? These bands made the artist shine.

You used to be able to listen to the Grand Ole Opry and hear the band playing in the background behind the announcer and you would know before the announcer even introduced the artist, who was coming onstage to perform because each artist’s band had it’s own signature sound.

This is missing in today’s music.

If you’re playing in a band with a steady gig, why not try incorporating some instrumentals into the mix? You may be surprised at how well that will go over. You should feature each player individually and give them 16 or 32 bars to show off what they can do, even in vocal songs.

Where would we be today without Steel Guitar Rag? The Sugarfoot Rag? Or Sleepwalk? We have strayed from our foundation. And just as we’ve strayed, we can also find our way back.

There’s something exciting about listening to a steel guitar, electric guitar, fiddles and such playing horn lines on a big band instrumental. This isn’t anything new. The Texas Playboys were doing it seventy years ago. Back then musicians were almost as famous as the singers and many people came to the shows just to hear them work their magic behind the singer and as featured soloists themselves.

One thing I’ve noticed in recent times is lead instruments not playing the melody of the song when they are featured in a vocal song. The instrumental break often sounds like a completely different song.

One of the best ways of really learning your instrument is to learn the melodies of the songs you’re going to play and play them. You can add little grace notes and little things in with it, but the listener should still be able to hear the melody of the song in what you’re playing. This has become a lost art.

Even the best jazzers of the bebop era would usually go through the simple melody of the song first before improvising solos. The solos can get as abstract and far out as possible, but hearing that basic melody first planted the basic idea of the song in the listeners mind and thus allowed him to follow the improvisation.

The improvisation, no matter how far out it got, had meaning and made sense because the listener was first introduced to the basic melody of the song.

I was telling someone in the showroom earlier that I thought the way to take the instrument forward is for players to hone their skills to the point where the audience will perk up and play attention when they play. Dynamics play an important role in this. Playing a pretty section real soft, then going into a real kicking chorus and bearing down on it shows emotional changes that can bring an audience to its feet.

Once you experience this for yourself, you’ll be inspired to raise your playing to the next level so that you can consistently do this. You can’t have the band at your disposal 24/7. So the best way to learn this is to get tracks CDs and play at home and pretend that you’re playing to a packed house at Billy Bob’s and you really want to wow them.

If you think steel guitar is limited to dance halls and honky tonks, for those of you who are too young to remember, Tom Brumley played Carnegie Hall with Buck Owens back in the sixties. I’ve personally played Madison Square Garden several times, The London Palladium, Symphony Hall in Boston, Massachusetts, I’ve played at The Kennedy Center in Washington for President Nixon, I played President Carter’s inauguration, for President George H. Bush’s birthday party, I played a concert for the Queen of England and several other black tie affairs.

So steel guitar can go anywhere. It’s not limited. Practice your scales and your arpeggios and your ear training exercises. Set down and write an instrumental once in awhile.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I still think that the best way to improve your playing is get tracks CDs and play along because sooner or later you’re going to have to play with other people and you need to at least get an idea of how to blend playing with other people.

Bobbe’s Columbus Day sale on tracks is still on and for less than the cost of a lesson, you can have endless hours of practice with tracks. I wish I could have had tracks to play along with when I was young. I was lucky to have a mechanical metronome.

Check out our monthly specials at www.steelguitar.net/monthlyspecials.html

www.steelguitar.net
sales@steelguitar.net
www.youtube.com/bobbeseymour

Listen To Steel Guitar Music Streaming 24 Hours A Day!

Steel Guitar Nashville
123 Mid Town Court
Hendersonville, TN. 37075
(615) 822-5555
Open 9AM – 4PM Monday – Friday
Closed Saturday and Sunday

Hello fellow players,

This is Vic Lawson with today’s newsletter.

Music is a language so the only way for people that don’t speak it is to feel it through our emotions. That’s why it’s so important to learn to play from the heart. Once you’ve learned to translate what you feel into your instrument, that’s when you can touch people with your playing.

Think about being somewhere where you hear a conversation in a foreign language. You really can’t understand what they are saying, but if they start to raise their voice, you know they are frustrated, or if they are sobbing, you know they are sad. It’s the same with the language of music.

When I play with a good band, I sometimes think about this. I hear so many subtle things come together in a moment and wish everyone could appreciate what just happened. I believe that’s why a lot of players tend to play just for each other, because we get it! But that’s where playing from the heart comes in. If we learn to do that, the audience doesn’t have to technically understand it, but they can feel it.

You don’t have to know how to make biscuits to know whether they taste good. But as long as we can appreciate it, that’s all that matters.

So think about this and the next time you play try to play with enough emotion that people will say “Wow! That made me cry.” Or try to play so your music gets them dancing. You will feel the satisfaction and that will make you a better player.

As a professional steel player, you’re constantly being challenged to learn new material on short notice. I played 12 hours on Saturday and 4 hours last night, I’m playing three shows this week with Darryl Singletary and Justin McBride so the next couple of nights will be spent learning Darryl Singletary’s material.

I’ve played for Darryl before but unfortunately I didn’t retain it so now I have to refresh myself and do it in a hurry. The older I get, the harder it is to retain things, so what I do these days is learn the signature licks, solos and fills the way I want to play them so I don’t have to copy everything note for note.

I make generous use of my Tascam Guitar Trainer. It’s really the best tool for the job and I’d be hard pressed to keep up if I didn’t have it. A good suggestion for anybody learning new material is when you start having to replay the same part to remember it, get up and take a 10 or 15 minute break and come back. That gives the material time to sink in before you start cramming new material in on top of it.

It’ll be three fun shows. If anybody wants to come out and say hi, we’re in Austin, Texas Thursday night at the country fair. We’ll be playing from 8 to 10 PM. Friday night we’ll be at the Cotton Club in Granger, Texas playing from 8:30 until midnight. Saturday night we’ll be in Delhi, Louisiana at the Cooterville Mud Rides playing from 11 PM until 1:15 AM. Come and say hi if you can.

For Columbus Day we have reduced all of our tracks CDs to $9.99, down from $15. Time to load up so you can practice playing with emotion. www.steelguitar.net/tracks.

Check out our monthly specials at www.steelguitar.net/monthlyspecials.html
www.steelguitar.net
sales@steelguitar.net
www.youtube.com/bobbeseymour

Listen To Steel Guitar Music Streaming 24 Hours A Day!

Steel Guitar Nashville
123 Mid Town Court
Hendersonville, TN. 37075
(615) 822-5555
Open 9AM – 4PM Monday – Friday
Closed Saturday and Sunday