Pedal Steel Music

Hello fellow players,

Well there it was, the weekend when all the steel players converged on St. Louis. The wonderful happening that was sponsored by DeWitt Scott Music and all the steel players that brought their talents.

I remember fifteen years ago talking to Scotty in the middle of the auditorium floor and he looked around and said, “Here it is, the entire history of steel guitar right here in front of us. The most famous players in the world. They’re right here and we are so lucky to all be under one roof.”

He said, “Someday we’ll look around during one of these shows and we may be all alone.” Well it’s getting closer and closer to that as we have lost most of the very greatest steel players in the entire world since that early September fifteen years ago. However, we do have some great players coming up through the ranks and by great, I mean totally astounding. The world of steel guitar is changing and there are some wonderful changes that are coming

I try to keep you posted on the development of new steel guitars and steel guitar shows and players that may be happening in Nashville, in the USA and in your area. I find it fun to review new products and try to only review the best of this merchandise. You know, the ones that I can be positive about, not negative.

Most of you can take my criticism of products in the vein that it is intended. Then of course, some can’t. But even the negative things have a certain amount of humor and may open your mind to the fact that there may possibly be something amiss and most always opens a subject for discussion.

My ultimate goal is to have you all enjoy the many aspects of steel guitar and many aspects there are. Steel guitar is a beautiful looking, sounding, feeling mechanical object that has a sound like nothing else in the world. It expresses what is happening in the inner soul of the player that is operating it.

I’m reminded of the time when I was playing the role of steel guitar player in the movie Nashville Girl. This was a pretty exotic production by Pierre Oppenheimer. This movie reminds me very much of the latest movie done in Nashville starring the questionable talents of Gwyneth Paltrow and Tim McGraw. I will brag and say that Nashville Girl was a many times better movie than this new one which is called Country Strong.

In Nashville this movie has been nick-named Country Wrong by several reviewers. The only good thing about it is the fact that steel guitarist Chris Scruggs actually gets quite a bit of camera time.

Anyway, as you probably know, all of these Hollywood done country music movies from WW and the Dixie Dance Kings through Urban Cowboy, Nashville Girl and many in between all have the same plot. Young girl moves to Nashville to make it big in the country music business and through all her exploits always seems to accomplish this the last five minutes of the film. Oh if real life could be that rewarding!

While surfing my television channels yesterday evening I lucked upon HD TV concert series.com where I saw tremendous talent and rock musicians from bands I didn’t even realize were there. David Gilmour, formerly of Pink Floyd, did an hour and a half show with some very big and accomplished musicians.

I assumed this was going to be another big rock concert but was shocked to count four steel guitars on stage, three Fender non-pedal guitars and a Rickenbacker non-pedal lapsteel. Wonderful music and arrangements, very little if any jump-around show biz antics, just really great music in front of a crowd of at least 30,000.

Steel guitar got as much air time as any other instrument on stage. Saying that the future of steel guitar is not bright would be a stupid thing to assume.

Then next on the program was Paul McCartney. Paul’s show was very beautifully laid out musically. Theatrics were held to a bare minimum and players were very well adept at what they did. No steel guitar, but there could’ve been and it wouldn’t have been out of place.

About all I can say is, hey everybody, if you think steel guitar is dead, just open your eyes and turn your TV on. Things seems to be getting brighter everyday.

I was invited to attend the Sho-Pro steel guitar show this weekend, but physical limitations prevented me from attending. I have already heard about the great job that all the players did on this wonderful show in Mount Juliet, Tennessee. Robbie Turner played some of the bulk of this show before the incomparable Tommy White came on stage and demonstrated his awe inspiring talent.

To say that I wish I could have been there is an understatement and I can only hope that Jeff Surratt and his lovely wife Gloria will see fit to invite me again next year. I also was not able to play the steel guitar show in St. Louis, but I would like to deeply thank all concerned that my nomination and induction into the Steel Guitar Hall of Fame was not something that I took lightly.

I even think they did a good job with the artwork putting my face on the bronze plaque. At least it doesn’t look like a cartoon caricature, but I may have looked better if it had been. The reason I’m writing this now is I wish to thank everyone of you that expressed your cares for having me there. I take it as a personal compliment in its sincerest form that you thought I should be there.

Some of the folks that made the final push on my behalf were Tom Bradshaw, Ron Kirby, Jim Wilkie, Fred Shannon, Lynn Owsley, Bob Mackel and Jody Carver. I thank you so much for believing in me and your efforts at getting me inducted into the Hall of Fame.

We have many military service personnel reading this newsletter every week, most of which are steel players or play related instruments. I’m very thankful for these readers. I have frustrating memories myself of trying to find anything musical at all to read when I was in the service. Trying to find anything about steel guitar was near impossible.

Just knowing that I could be of any help, service or give pleasure with my writings to these exceptional people that are working so hard to fight for all of us who want a better world. God love all of you.

Since we are coming into steel guitar month, we would like to kick it off by offering a big sale on many items that you all seem to have taken to your hearts, like the Bobro, the Nashville 112 amplifier and GFI guitars. We also offer bars, picks and strings at great savings. Teaching DVDs and CDs, some of these things will be up to fifty percent off.

When you order what you want, just let us know that you are a subscriber to this steel guitar newsletter and the discounts will apply to you. Get ready for a big Sho-Bud sale to celebrate steel guitar month.

Check out our monthly specials at www.steelguitar.net/monthlyspecials.html and we’ll try to save you a lot of money.

The friend to all bar holders,
Bobbe Seymour
www.steelguitar.net
sales@steelguitar.net
www.youtube.com/bobbeseymour
www.myspace.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 fans and fellow players,

I just received a very wonderful email from Aaron Doyle. He also is taken aback by the beauty of steel guitar and related a story to me of when he bought his first steel guitar. He went into detail to tell me about the red-ish color finish, the great shine it had and was pretty well captivated before he had even heard it. When he heard the sound it made, he was totally taken in.

It reminds me very much of my own story. When I was 8 years old, I had already been pretty well infected by an Uncle that was a professional steel guitarist. He was living and working in New York state and I was living and going to school in Statesville, North Carolina. My father had the main music store in Statesville. He was a Gibson dealer.

I’ll never forget the first steel guitar my father got in the store for stock. Everything that should capture you from the smell, feel, touch and sound of these great instruments absolutely ripped my heart out.

Aaron says he has 12 guitars and he really has some of them just because they are works of art. I totally understand this concept. I have two Clinesmith guitars that fill a spot in my heart when nothing else really could with the exception of Bigsby. Of course, I love and have my Emmons pushpull and some of those wonderful old Sho-Buds.

The way steel guitar produces its notes with a bar on the strings instead of contacting frets underneath the strings loans itself to nice, beautiful and long sustaining tone. This quality is hard to find in most other instruments. Saxophone, trumpet and most brass instruments don’t worry about sustain because that has more to do with lung capacity than any natural qualities within the instrument. With piano, sustain is an important quality. Not necessarily so with violins or drums.

With steel guitar, it’s very important because part of the beauty of this instrument is notes that have been picked, flowing into other chords. The way these little chords ring and run into the next little chord and the way they can all sustain together is a very nice and beautiful quality.

Like we discussed in the last newsletter, maple not only sounds great, but sustains very well because of its hardness. Yes, the wood does get better with time because it dries out and gets harder and the sap that originally worked against sustain in the wood is no longer a hindrance as the wood ages and the sap dries out.

Since it takes a steel guitar player many years to develop a taste for tone, the new younger players themselves may not have much of an idea of what they are really listening for.

Since it takes a steel guitar player many years to develop a taste for tone, the new younger players themselves may not have much of an idea of what they are really listening for.

The mysteries of tone? As you can see by this newsletter so far, the pickup on a steel guitar is not what creates the tone any more than Lady Gaga’s microphone creates her voice. (By the way, I am pretty impressed with her talent.)

The Emmons push pull guitar was manufactured quite a bit differently than most other guitars. The maple is thin, the aluminum necks are fairly thick, all the parts that go under the guitar are suspended between the front and the back boards. The less knee levers and pedals on these guitars, the better they sound.

As you can see, the difference in different models of Emmons guitars may be due directly to the number of knee levers that the owner has chosen to install on his guitar. This can also apply to other brands. I have had and played Emmons PP steel guitars with no knee levers and found them to be extremely great sounding guitars.

About the worst habit a young player has is the bad habit of being a volume pedal pumper. I’ve touched on this subject so much in the past that I’m going to leave it alone now, but one of the world’s greatest steel guitar players, Jerry Byrd, once said, “If most of the newer players would throw their volume pedal in the river, they could all sound better immediately.”

I’ll go a step further myself and say I’ve heard several professional players that would sound better if they did the same thing.

Any player that thinks tone doesn’t make a difference should come into my showroom and play any five guitars and then tell me there’s no difference in sound between them.

Check out our monthly specials at www.steelguitar.net/monthlyspecials.html and we’ll try to save you a lot of money.

The friend to all bar holders,
Bobbe Seymour
www.steelguitar.net
sales@steelguitar.net
www.youtube.com/bobbeseymour
www.myspace.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,

From this office where I’m writing this letter, I can many steel guitars out the door. Gorgeous guitars made of birdseye, fiddleback and curly northern Canadian maple. Old Sho-Buds with African ebony necks, purple heart bodies, beautiful English cherry, Zebrawood from South America and many other solid exotic woods that anybody would be proud to have in their house.

I’m expecting the U.S. Government to come crashing through the front door any day and tell us we can’t sell our beautiful vintage steel guitars if we can’t prove the wood came from middle Tennessee.

The Gibson Company that cares to keep quality where we can all be proud of the name by building most of the most sought after guitars in the world, building a product that the finest players of Asia, Europe and wherever great players work and reside, crave, is having to fight the American government to continue to use the great wood that goes into these guitars.

I’m saying this next sentence with a certain amount of humor, but it looks like MSA may have really had the right idea with their Tupperware guitar. I thought they looked great, but didn’t really want to do much experimenting because I really didn’t care for the tone of them. But it was beautiful and durable.

To me, ninety percent of the beauty of steel guitars are the beautiful natural materials that they are made from. When I was a little kid in northern New York State I used to walk across the gymnasium floor and fall in love with the highly figured maple boards that would appear randomly. After awhile, the teachers, coaches and all the students were walking around the floor in their stocking feet looking for highly grained flamed maple.

I had dreams of one night going in and borrowing some of these highly figured boards to take home and build a lapsteel.

Sho-Bud and Bigsby were the two steel guitar brands of the 50’s and 60’s that totally ripped my heart out with natures most beautiful figured maple. I did see some gorgeous big birdseye cherry at one time in my life, but the lumber company sold it before I could get back and buy what they had. It probably ended up in somebody’s fireplace.

Anyway, it’s a horrible shame that the time for building steel guitars, gun stocks and some other highly visible items that don’t take much of this natural resource is drawing to a close. Someday you may only be able to see it in pictures.

Birdseye maple is the most desirable of anything that effects us because it is a tone wood that sounds extremely good and it’s beauty is unsurpassed. The government has not closed in on us yet over the birdseye maple issue since a lot of it is grown here in the United States. However, I’m expecting to see this happen at any time. Can you imagine them coming and knocking on our doors and confiscating our old guitars like they are confiscating Gibsons from the factory now?

First Gibson, then Fender, Paul Reed Smith, Martin, D’Angelico, Epiphone and then what? How long will it be before nice formica will be on the illegal materials list?

These companies that are covering wonderful tone woods like maple with formica may have a foot up on the competition because they are getting the beautiful tone of the maple, but keeping it hidden by packing it under formica which does not hurt the tone in any way and will keep the prying eyes of Big Brother from infringing on our civil liberty.

Well naturally, I feel like I’m being a little bit silly here. I hope so anyway. But I’d still like to talk to George Washington about chopping down that cherry tree and not receiving anymore punishment than he got. He also threw a silver dollar across the Potomac River so history states, but then you have to realize the dollar went a lot further in those days.

When I was but a mere child of two or three years old, my grandfather on my mother’s side built a bed and a chest of drawers out of finely aged New York maple that he cut off his own property and kiln dried himself. I dreamed of making a steel guitar from this wood for many years. Now I’m afraid the government will get it.

Don’t get me wrong, I love this country very much and I’m a very loyal patriot and have spent much time and I put myself in much danger in the service of my country.

I’d hate to think that government is going to force use to build steel guitars from fiberglass, plastic and other artificial materials. Here’s a link to the Wall Street Journal article for the details.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904787404576530520471223268.html

Now off to another topic. I regret to inform all my great friends I will not be attending the Steel Guitar Convention in St. Louis this year because of health problems that I’m having. This is especially hurtful this year because I am one of three players that are going into the International Steel Guitar Hall of Fame.

This is supposed to be a secret, however it has been pretty widely publicized in several places. I’m very sorry that I can’t be there, but it’s a near impossibility for me to get very far away from my doctors. I’ll truly miss all of you that are going as I miss everyone in the world of steel guitar continuously.

I thank you very much for being my friends and please stay in my corner.

Check out our monthly specials at www.steelguitar.net/monthlyspecials.html and we’ll try to save you a lot of money.

The friend to all bar holders,
Bobbe Seymour
www.steelguitar.net
sales@steelguitar.net
www.youtube.com/bobbeseymour
www.myspace.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