Pedal Steel Music

Hello fans and fellow players,

I have told hundreds of people over the past few years that steel guitars area great investment. They have been a good investment and have been eking up in value over the past several years. Overall this has been true, however because of the present economic situation being handled by our elected officials, the value of steel guitars has receded in the past few months, specifically over the past year.

This is no fault of the music business, players, stores or even the manufacturers, but is instead primarily a Washington D.C. factor. I will not get into politics because that is not what you want to hear in my tips newsletters. However, I want you all to know that there is somewhat of a recession going on, regardless of whether Washington wants to call it that or not.

Like steel guitars, many things have seen the bottom drop out of their values. Private aircraft, collector cars, guns, houses, about anything collectible with the exception of gold and silver which to me is not very much fun to collect because if you have it, all you can do is hide it and hope nobody knows you have it. At least, steel guitars can be used and they hardly ever get stolen because that crooked element of our society doesn’t know what they are, the value of them or how or where to sell them.

Steel guitars may still be as good as anything to protect your assets. I notice the price of Bigsby steel guitars have come down a little. It’s not because folks don’t want them just as much as ever, but because the loose cash required to invest in them is going several places that it didn’t use to have to go, like food, gasoline, power bills and so on.

This is not to say your steel guitar has been a poor investment or that it won’t be a good investment in the future. I still feel that when it comes to musical instruments that if you buy the correct steel guitar you will have a very safe investment, but don’t expect it to grow in value much like it hasn’t in the last year.

Emmons push pulls, even though they haven’t gone up in the last year, along with Bigsbys and some models of Sho-Bud, are still better to have your money in them than it is in most banks.

When it comes to amplifiers, little powerful amps with great tone are still the best investment. I think the Peavey Nashville 112 is probably as safe a place to put your money if you want to use what your money can buy for several years and still get most of it back.

Of course, if you want a steel guitar to play and you’re not worried about investment and return on your money, I can still recommend the old standards, especially if you buy them from me because we discount all new and used guitars to the point of the manufacturer being mad at us for selling so inexpensively. We try very hard to undersell everybody everywhere on anything you want to buy in the steel guitar line.

Sometimes we have a price floor or bottom line that the manufacturer will tell us we cannot sell below, so what I do is bundle the guitar with many accessories that I can either give away or sell for half price. So overall, you’re still getting a wholesale deal if you buy a package.

Anyway, one way or another I promise you I can save you much money to say nothing of the service and warranty that I can give because of our highly skilled technicians.

As you can see, there’s more than one reason to buy a steel guitar. Buy it to use, buy it to learn to play because it’s easy and beautiful to do or buy it for just plain monetary investment. Most of you know as well as I do that times will get better. As a matter of fact, now is the time to buy. Now is not the time to sell.

I’ll never forget my first trip to Las Vegas as a young, new, road player out of Nashville. I met the bus which was an older 4104 General Motors 36 passenger coach converted to a star’s ego extension. Getting on the bus, seeing the smoke billow out as the big 671 Detroit diesel engine fired up, was very exciting.

Exciting that is until the star, who was driving the bus was backing up and asked the bass player, “Did you put my new custom built Gower rhythm guitar on the bus?” I noticed he said this with a tremendous amount of pride knowing that this beautiful hand-crafted guitar was just picked up by him that week.

The bass player said, “No. I didn’t put it on the bus, but I saw it leaning up against the back of it when I got on.” I jumped up, ran off the bus, ran to the back where it was last seen and there it was, right where he had run over it, crushed case with the guitar inside.

Not wanting to be the bearer of bad news, I called Mr. Grand Ole Opry star off the bus and said, “I don’t know where it is. Possibly you can find it. Go around the other side.” Naturally he found it. He was in a horrible mood. I thought he could never be anymore unhappy or angry until he put the bus in low gear and with an angry mood, let out on the clutch making a hard left turn leaving the parking and lot side-swiping his new Cadillac convertible.

The audience was full of fair buyers, producers, bookers, other acts which included Judy Lynn and band, Buck Owens and his Buckaroos, some other famous acts and he turned around and looked at us with this horrible out of tune chord still ringing and said in a low voice, “You’d think a guy could get his guitar tuned for a steak dinner.”

Our band saw no humor in it at the time, but we never forgot it and ended up kidding about it a year or so later. So much for my first road trip in a big bus with a big star out of Nashville. Things have never been the same as they were in the sixties.

We have a very exciting brand new product that hundreds of you have been asking about for a long time. It’s a very light, very tuff bar that used with or without a Bobro or Dobro simulator, will add dobro quality to a steel guitar sound. These bars used in conjunction with the Bobro will give a very realistic Dobro feel and sound. Designed to absorb sustaining notes and overtones and deliver a true Dobro sound with the ambiance of the acoustic instrument you’re trying to duplicate.

Many of you in the past have written me and asked me when these bars would be available. They are finally here. www.steelguitar.net/bars.html

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,

I’m getting a lot of folks inquiring about pickups, guitar cord diameter and volume pedals again. Let me hit these answer right quick for these nice folks.

Guitar cords should always be of the small diameter. Extremely low resistance. About all you really need to know is George L. This company has the finest guitar cords for sound in the business, no question. We’ve been handling these cords for the last 15 years. These cords are preferred by Nashville’s finest players. You having trouble with strings sounding like they are running together? How about your highs disappearing?

Well, you need George L small diameter cords and you need them all the way to your amplifier, not just part way. This means George L cords to and from your volume pedal, to your amplifier and in and out of any effects units. If you really want the best tone and you want the tone that your guitar is making, to get to your amplifier without any tonal change, George L is what you have to have.

There a lot of people asking me if we did financing here at Steel Guitar Nashville. Every once in a while, we’ll do a layaway on an item, however with credit cards being so easy to get nowadays, we are not doing any financing. That’s the way the banks make a living and since they don’t sell steel guitars, I won’t get into their financing.

Everybody seems to want to experiment with pickups. I can see no reason not to do this, except that it pretty well tears your guitar up if you don’t know what you’re doing. When it comes to brands of pickups, I’m having good results with the Alumatone on anything made by Fender, GFI, Emmons or Zum. I haven’t really tried anything else yet.

A little bit of guitar massaging needs to be done to put these pickups in, however with a good $39 Dremel, you can do it well. I am referring to Alumatone in this paragraph, however most other brands are even easier to install.

Of course, we still have the same problems with volume pedals and their pots wearing out that we have always had, however just remember, when it comes time to replace the pot, we’ll give you as big a discount as we possibly can on the new pot and parts to replace the pot and anything worn.

We have sold hundreds of the Hilton potless electronic pedals by now and have had almost no problem with any of them. This is really the perfect solution to a sticky problem because the Hilton pedal does not require a pot. Remember, if the pedal doesn’t have a pot, you don’t need to replace it. We have one Hilton pedal on the floor in our demo room and it’s been there problem free for seven years. Definitely worth the little extra money.

If you come to within two or three hundred miles of Nashville this summer on your vacation travels, be sure to come to beautiful Hendersonville on the lake. Rather than me filling up your inbox, I’ll just tell you to google Hendersonville, Tennessee and look at the many pop, rock and country music stars that live in this little town and you can see that it’s located right up against Nashville and is genuinely the musical part of Music City.

This is a very historical town and has been since 1789 when I was very young. Many of Nashville’s greatest steel players live here along with most of Nashville’s greatest country music stars. Plan on coming out and after you see me at Steel Guitar Nashville, take a drive around the lake and see where Tammy, George Jones, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Connie Smith and Marty Stuart and hundreds of other warbling hillbillies call home.

There are also some tinkling steel guitar players here. Of course, we have some chicken pickin’ lead players also and that sound in the distance you may hear could possibly be new construction going up, however it’s probably a drummer practicing for the break on Working Man Blues.

As most of you know, we have a pretty exotic instrument repair facility here. Every once in awhile, an instrument will come in that we’ve heard on hundreds of recording sessions. Instruments like the 200 plus year old acoustic bass that belongs to A-team bassist Henry Strzelecki.

Henry is one of the original studio A-team players and has been on many hundreds of hit songs recorded in Nashville, Tennessee. Henry always has a smile and his hand out to shake your hand whenever he sees you. A nicer personality I don’t know of. Every big session I have ever worked with Henry has been pure pleasure and a big part because of him.

Henry also wrote one of my favorite tunes, Long Tall Texan, a great song with comic overtones that went gold not long after its release. Doing recording sessions for a living was not always fun, however if Henry was on the session, you just knew it was going to be very pleasant.

Steel guitar jam sessions or guitar pulls. Sometimes steel players like to get together for a guitar pull or jam. When they do they’ll setup in a round circle with one or two amps in the middle aiming straight up at the ceiling. Something to keep time, a loud metronome or tracks or possibly even a live drummer and bass player. Lord knows, don’t ever let a singer in one of these get-togethers because you’ll end up getting nothing done.

Each steel player will take about two verses, pass it to the next player, sit and study what everybody else plays and it doesn’t matter if it takes an hour per song. Remember, you shouldn’t have anybody in there where you’re jamming that will be listening for their own musical pleasure. The jam session is for musicians only and nobody else should be in the same town or county. You’ll notice all the dogs and cats will leave the area. You don’t need some girl or wife hanging around saying “Let ole Billy sing one!” And you never, ever, ever setup a PA set on a jam session.

Ok troops. Send me some questions about jam sessions if you wish.

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’d like to thank several of you players for coming by and visiting with me last week. Some of you I hadn’t seen in a pretty good while. Larry Self and wife Angie put on a wonderful steel guitar show every year until recently in the Orlando area of Florida was most welcome to be seen in my shop. Larry had a steel guitar store that covered the Deland/Sanford/Orlando area. Larry is living in Dayton, Tennessee now on top of a mountain ridge. If he could bottle scenery and sell it, he’d be a millionaire.

Great guitar player Shane Koontz from Bloomington, Indiana that used to be my guitar player at the Conway Twitty Theater also paid me a long overdue visit. Thank you Shane. Great steel guitarist Kenny Foy brought me some wonderful refreshments that he brewed up at his own house. Kenny has been a long time customer and steel guitar player. Kenny is one of those guys that over-married. (Laugh!)

Many, many of you have responded favorably to me answering your questions in my tips email, so I will precede to answer several more of your questions.

Question. Do you bend strings behind the bar? Answer. Yes, I did this on C6th neck, E9th and non-pedal. I no longer do that because I removed my ring finger that I used to use for this purpose. It still hurts. Well, I still do it but I have to use my little finger on my left hand .

Why did you choose steel guitar as your main instrument? I like it for being the beautiful mechanical machine that it is.

Is this the only reason that you play steel guitar? No. I love the tone and the ease in getting big complex chords.

Do you prefer playing old standards and jazz chords on steel or piano? I love steel guitar because it will do more things differently than piano. With steel guitar I can hit a chord, raise and lower notes in the chord without breaking the sustain of the chord. The chord keeps ringing where on a piano I would have to stop the strings from ringing before I changed the pitch of individual notes.

Plus on steel guitar, not only do I get the complex chords, but I can also get a lot lower notes and a lot higher notes at the same time. Some things on steel guitar are just easier to play than they are on piano. I like the speed of being able to play several different things quickly on piano, but steel is not as limited as most people think it is. Then when it comes to beauty and tone, we all know steel is the winner.

Question. How does it make you feel to go to a steel guitar show and hear younger players play your style on songs you’ve recorded? Answer. It makes me feel great. It’s really a nice off-handed compliment. I want to help everybody to play as well as they can.

What inspired you to record your As Time Goes By jazz standard album? That’s the kind of music I grew up with. I just always wanted to fit in with that kind of group. When I sit down to practice, I love thinking in big chords, however I realize that most steel guitar fans would rather hear somebody play real fast than have somebody play big chords. I’m always walking the line between doing what I think people want to hear and what I really want to play.

Question. Does your artistry extend to other mediums like painting? Answer. When I was taking art in New York State I enjoyed working with charcoal. I haven’t done much oil painting, but I find it fascinating. I’m still a pilot and fly my airplanes whenever I can. I really enjoy working on steel guitars and doing things that people say can’t be done. Technically anything can be done mechanically with about any steel guitar. These are the things that are fun.

Question. Bobbe, I’m surprised you haven’t gotten into electronics since they are so closely related to what you do with steel guitar building. I always wished I would have stayed more into the electronic field. I understand very well the theory of guitar amplification, however there are some very fine points that keep me from being an electronic engineer. This is what I would want to be, not just a fix-it guy.

For instance, I want to know exactly why one brand of amplifier sounds so much different than another brand when the schematics may look almost the same. I just think it would be a lot of fun to grab a handful of parts, wire and a soldering gun and start building.

Many years ago I hired a bass player for a job. He showed up about 20 minutes til starting time with just a paper bag full of parts. I asked him where his amp was. He replied that he was just going to have to put one together right quick.

He said, “Where can I plug in?”

So I asked him, “Plug what in?”

He said, “My soldering gun.”

He pulled an ugly hand punched chassis out of a gig bag, started soldering resistors, capacitors, tube sockets and his transformer together. In 12 to 15 minutes he plugged this monstrosity that he had just built. The tubes all lit up. He plugged his bass into the front and the back of the amp he plugged into the bass reflex cabinet.

The bass immediately made a big, soft, warm, booming tone like I had never heard before. This was an astounding feat that I just couldn’t believe. This was in Norfolk, Virginia and if I remember correctly, his name was Earl Costerude. I haven’t seen or heard from him since. He’s probably working for NASA or the CIA. Great bass player, great electronics tech and a good guy. I learned more in that one night talking to him on break than I’ve ever learned since.

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