Pedal Steel Music

Hello fellow players,

In the last newsletter I covered materials that are used in steel guitars, namely the exotic woods. Everyone agrees that maple, well dried makes about the best sounding body that can be built. Well dried maple from 5/8ths to 3/4ths seems to be the trick when it comes to building a good steel guitar body. Maple is getting harder and harder to find every year. That is, maple with good knurled grain. Straight grain maple is a lot easier to find and to my ear, straight grain maple sounds about as good as birdseye or fiddle-back maple.

But if you’re not going to paint the wood or cover it with mica, the grain in the birdseye maple will really help the value of the guitar. You’ll find grain in maple that you won’t find in most other kinds of wood. After all, whoever heard of curly ebony?

At times, you will run across some walnut with good grain and possibly a small piece of birch, but maple is what you need to look for, for tone. Many people have asked me what difference the kind of wood makes for tone because it’s a solid body guitar, not an acoustic body and they’ll say, “It’s the pickup where the tone comes from and not the body.”

Nothing could be more ridiculous or farther from the truth. If the guitar doesn’t sound good acoustically it’s not going to sound good when you put a pickup in or a microphone in front of it. As I have said many times before, it’s not the microphone that makes the singer sound good, it the way he sounds normally without being amplified.

Sure, a tiny amount of the timbre comes from the amplifier, the tape machine, the cords, the microphone and so on, but if the tone isn’t being made at the source, the finest equipment in the world won’t help.

The bridge on a steel guitar, the way it is mounted and where it is placed as to the string length is also very important. This is why Fender Stringmasters sound very differently even though the guitars are make out of the same wood in pretty much the same way. The string length being twenty two and a half, twenty four and a half or twenty six will sound amazingly different.

What I’m trying to tell you here is there are many things that can affect the tone of a steel guitar, even if they all have the same pickup. There are a couple of pedal steel guitars made today that I see people raving about how incredible they are, but these people are having tremendous problems with the tone of the guitar. These players are continuously trading their pickups around. They’re buying TrueTones, Alumatones, Lawrence and GeorgeLs trying to fix the tone of their steel guitar, but to no avail.

Soon they realize that they are fighting an uphill battle, even with great amplifiers, they’re having serious problems but they’ll never get fixed with different pickups. There will always be a market for these guitars because many people just don’t realize what the problem is, and many wouldn’t notice the problem if they did know tone.

I remember in my first years of playing steel guitar, I always wanted to get a Bigsby pickup to put on my guitar. I went on for years. I finally bought a used Bigsby pickup from Shot Jackson. I put it on my guitar and it still didn’t fix my tone. The guitar just had to be right and it wasn’t.

I used to think Chet Atkins tone was all in his black Gretsch pickups make by DeArmond. Then he switched to Gibson. His tone did not get any worse, but stayed pretty much the same. A lot of it had to do with his hands, the way he set the controls on the amplifier and his aggressiveness or execution in playing the Gibson.

The same thing here goes for steel guitar. It’s hard to beat an Emmons push pull through a Standel or Webb amplifier. I’ve heard some incredible Sho-Buds through old Fenders and I’ve heard Sho-Buds through several other kinds of amps. Then I’ve heard some bad steel guitars that I won’t name here that sounded bad no matter what you plugged them into.

The reason I’m bringing all this up is that in the last two months I’ve had many steel players email me saying their tone is nowhere near as gorgeous as I get on records. They want to know how myself, Lloyd Green and many of the Nashville players get the tone that we do.

It’s really pretty easy to get a good tone if you have the right guitar and a very good amplifier, the right cords, volume pedal and attack the strings correctly with your right hand. If you ever get a chance to see Ron Elliott play, watch him closely. Lloyd is a good player, gets good tone as is Steve Hinson with Randy Travis and many other players in this town that sound really good. They pick correctly with good right hand technique and are pretty fanatical about their equipment.

I was pretty shocked the other night to hear Lynn Owsley get such a good tone from what I considered a somewhat off brand guitar, but he sounded great through a Webb amplifier. Jimmy Day also sounded great as you’ll remember through a Webb amplifier.

One more thing I’d like to add before I close out this newsletter is guitars that were previously owned by star players. It’s foolish to think that these guitars are better because so and so star had them and played them for several years. Guitars of the same brand and model are pretty much created equal. What makes them sound different is the player and his choice of amplifier settings and his technique.

Listen to the difference in Curly Chalkers playing and Ralph Mooneys playing. The difference is night and day, however both can be playing the same brand of guitar. It’s not all their hands. It’s their choice of amplifier settings and their minute choices of cords, picks, volume pedals and effects.

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

Your buddy,
Bobbe
www.steelguitar.net
sales@steelguitar.net
www.youtube.com/bobbeseymour
www.myspace.com/bobbeseymour

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,

First of all, I would like to thank all of you for the tremendous response I’m getting from you for the articles on players and their guitars. Being in Nashville through the golden days of Sho-Bud was very interesting to see. Being there to see so much of the design work and thinking that went into this wonderful company was amazing and yes it was painful to see it come to the end that it has, however the demand for good Sho-Buds is like the demand for ’32 Fords and ’57 Chevys. The demand is there regardless of the factories producing them.

Sure, the new Chevys of today are extremely quick, get great mileage and the air conditioning always blow cold, but when you see one pass you on the road, you never look at it twice. But let a ’57 Chevrolet convertible pass you from either direction and you’ll definitely say “Wow!”

The Sho-Bud guitars are receiving some of this charisma themselves. Just look at the steel guitar forum and see where somebody may post asking for pictures of Sho-Buds in the world today. All the beautiful Sho-Buds that show up are really a treat to see. Let’s face it guys, Sierra, Emmons, MSA, Mullen, GFI and most other brands just don’t have that beauty that reaches out and slaps you in the face the way that the Sho-Bud guitar does.

It’s pretty hard to not love something that’s made of wood that’s so exotic today that buying and selling it is against the law. Sho-Bud has used all the great exotic woods in the past. Ebony, zebrawood, purple heart, the best burl walnut, Brazilian rosewood and the greatest birdseye maple that’s ever been found along with many other types of exotic woods that are now on the worldwide endangered list.

It won’t be long until just owning a guitar made of some of these exotic woods will put the price of the guitar over the top for most folks. The finishes that have been put on most of these old guitars are hand rubbed lacquer applied with the greatest of care.

As most of you know, I am a Bigsby steel guitar fan also, but Bigsby did not make guitars with the variety of wood that Shot Jackson did at Sho-Bud, or let’s just say, the Jackson family did at Sho-Bud. Bigsbys now have reached values that are astronomic for steel guitars, with even old rough ones going for $12,000 and up. Some star owned double and triple neck guitars with 10 string necks and pedals are going from $40 – 80,000.

The early Sho-Bud guitars are just now starting to break loose in the world of collectability, originality still being a big factor. It’s hard to predict what guitars being made today will collectable in the future, but it’s a pretty sure bet that Clinesmith and Jackson and some early Emmons push pull guitars will be climbing the list of desirable guitars to have as time goes by.

Things that are going to make guitars collectable are the things that have made them collectable in the past. Quality, tone, exotic materials, rarity and so on. Restoring a fantastic old Sho-Bud will not hurt the value of the guitar if pains are taken to keep the guitar original. Things like tuning keys and pickups can be changed without hurting the value of the guitar. Chrome plating, buffing the aluminum and replateing any steel parts will not hurt of the value of the guitar, but done with care can enhance the value.

I remember twenty five years ago the little three leg Fender guitars were worth almost nothing. Today, restored correctly, they are definitely getting to be very valuable. The good thing is again, just like restoring a classic car and driving it daily, a restored steel guitar can be worth the small investment for restoration to enhance its playability.

I’m seeing many great steel guitar players reaching back in time and buying guitars like the Fender Dual Professional, Gibson Console Grand and Rickenbacker doubles and triples and definitely the little Rickenbacker Bakelite and Frypan lapsteels.

One thing that everybody needs to be very careful of is getting an old guitar to restore and it having no value, now or in the future. Unfortunately, some fairly well known guitars will never be worth much. Like the National double eight. A good guitar, just not much retail value, restored or not. The same with some Rickenbacker models. It seems like every Fender has value in the collector market as do many of the non-pedal Gibsons.

The little Gibson Consolette is a very nice little guitar with a good value when it’s in good condition. Most of what I’ve been saying here in the last few paragraphs concerns non-pedal guitars. Many of these guitars have had a pedal or two added. Done correctly with class and quality, this will not hurt the value of the guitar. Shot Jackson himself, before the days of Sho-Bud, did many non-pedal to pedal guitar conversions. Any of these are worth big money today.

He converted guitars for such artists as James Farmer with Marty Robbins, Howard White with Cowboy Copas and many players that were on the Nashville scene in the mid-fifties. Shot was doing so many of these conversions that he decided to start a steel guitar company and build the whole guitar and not just add pedals to some other brand of steel guitar. This was the beginning of the Sho-Bud venture in the mid-fifties.

These guitars that Shot converted are better guitars today than they were when he did them because strings can be bought today (Cobra Coil) that are much more durable than strings that were being built in the mid-fifties.

If there is a steel guitar in your past that had legs and sounded like a million dollars to you, you can probably get one very inexpensively and have one or two pedals installed on it, then go back and learn all those great licks that were being played on records in the fifties and be known as one of the best steel players ever.

This sort of takes us back to Ralph Mooney and his double neck eight string Magnatone. He added a pedal to this guitar very crudely fashioned from a car jack handle that had previously been used as a lug wrench and turned that little rascal into a million dollar lifetime achievement.

Talk about tone? Mooney was wonderful in all commercial aspects of playing his commercial style as simply as possible.

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

Your buddy,
Bobbe
www.steelguitar.net
sales@steelguitar.net
www.youtube.com/bobbeseymour
www.myspace.com/bobbeseymour

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 started a couple weeks ago doing the history of some of the players of steel guitar. One interesting player in Nashville that has left us now was the great Hal Rugg. Hal was a very competitive steel player in Nashville and was always on a quest to have a better guitar, which included searching high and low, finding something great and trying to improve on it.

The Sho-Bud company located at 416 Broadway in downtown Nashville with satellite factories on the north and south side of town were great places for Hal to experiment. He was the right person to do this kind of experimenting because he worked the Opry as a staff player and did many recording sessions throughout the week.

Hal and David Jackson, who was the main driving force behind this company, were in close cahoots and shared many ideas on some very interesting approaches to building steel guitars.

About the time that many of the players were switching over to Emmons guitars, Hal thought that there was no reason to do this if the right model Sho-Bud could be designed and built. So he and David decided to build some experimental guitars that similar building processes that the Emmons company was using, one of which was the aluminum neck, something that Sho-Bud had never done up until this time.

The first guitar that was built by and for Hal to try to accomplish this feat was a brown double ten with eight pedals and four knee levers. I remember hanging around the factory when this guitar was going together. I made the comment to David that I was sure he could find some nicer looking formica to put on the guitar than that ridiculous brown simulated birdseye that he had.

David’s reply was, “We’re not building this guitar to look good. We’re building it to be a better sounding guitar and we’re just experimenting with brown mica and aluminum necks. The next time I saw this guitar, I was playing the Opry with Billy Walker and Hal had the guitar there and was using it with acts that he was backing up. It sounded wonderful on the Opry, but Hal took a lot of verbal abuse because of the strange looking brown mica on the guitar.

So he went back to David at Sho-Bud and said, “Let’s build one just like it but put some beautiful black shiny mica on it instead of the brown.” Six months later it was done. Hal played the black one for awhile and claimed to really love it, but ended up going back to the brown one and using it until many people started ordering identical guitars from Sho-Bud.

At this time, David Jackson called Hal and told him to bring the guitars back to the store because too many people were asking for steel guitars like this but the factory wasn’t building them.

Besides, David had an idea for a revolutionary new guitar that had a changer at both ends of the guitar. The guitar raised at the right end by the pickup and lowered strings from the other end which was normally the keyhead end. Hal and myself went into the factory to check this unit out. Hal took it straight to the Opry and played it several times before David called him and told him he’d built a couple more and wanted Hal to try them out.

David ended up building six keyless guitars in all, but none of them were ever actually sold to any customers outside of Nashville. A few years later I ended up buying the two double neck Sho-Buds and all six keyless guitars when I was in my Goodlettsville store. I bought these along with many other experimental guitars that David was working on at the time.

I bought barrels of parts, tons of birdseye maple and many truckloads of parts and added this bevy of parts and guitars to stock in my Goodlettsville store. It was ten years before I had most of these sold off. I remember Johnny Cox buying one of the best keyless guitars that David had built and I actually converted a couple of them back to models that had keyheads and tuning keys.

I sold the famous brown double neck guitar to a gentleman in Nashville named Pete Harris. He was rather old and retired and really didn’t play much. He sold it to a guy named Larry Johnson. Larry was just a student guitar player and left it in a building that he had rented and lost it when he didn’t pay the rent on the building. I ended up buying the guitar back from his landlord.

I sold the guitar to a recording company here in Hendersonville, Tennessee. Then it was sold to a preacher in South Dakota and as luck would have it, he traded this guitar back in to me for the much nicer looking black guitar that Hal Rugg had second.

I have talked with David Jackson and we have decided to totally restore the brown one to better than new specifications, cosmetically anyway. Hal Rugg went back to using a sixties model permanent setup double ten sandalwood brown Permanent guitar on a lot of the video clips that you can see now on YouTube.

These two guitars with the mica and aluminum necks turned out to be the forerunner of the Sho-Bud Pro III model. Later they were scaled down in dimension and they were turned into what is now called the Super Pro. So as you can see, Hal Rugg played about anything that Sho-Bud was building on an experimental basis.

Hal had a little to do with how David built these guitars, but David Jackson that was the president of Sho-Bud was actually the father of all these models. He built them all himself with a little help from Hal, Duane Marrs and the production staff at Sho-Bud at the time.

The story of all these experimental guitars is pretty well unknown to the masses and is the stuff of many rumors over the years. Many people that think they know a lot about what went on, don’t even have a clue. Every once in awhile I’ll see a statement on Ebay or the Steel Guitar Forum where someone will post Sho-Bud never did anything like that. Well I’m here to tell you, David Jackson at Sho-Bud did almost everything. Many great ideas sprung from the fertile mind of this young genius and Hal was right there to prove or disprove the validity of many of these designs.

It’s unbelievable what great guitars were designed fifty years ago and graced the stage of the Grand Ole Opry under the hands of Hal Rugg, Buddy Emmons, Shot Jackson, Ron Elliott, myself and many others. In the very beginning when Sho-Bud started, players like Howard White, Porter Wagoner’s steel player Don Warden, Buddy Emmons, Hal Rugg and Pete Drake, Ben Keith, Jimmy Crawford and Weldon Myrick, these guys were the crusaders for Sho-Bud in the very beginning and the stage at the Grand Ole Opry was the proving grounds for many of the early Sho-Buds.

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

Your buddy,

Bobbe

www.steelguitar.net

sales@steelguitar.net

www.youtube.com/bobbeseymour

www.myspace.com/bobbeseymour

Steel Guitar Nashville

123 Mid Town Court

Hendersonville, TN. 37075

(615) 822-5555

Open 9AM – 4PM Monday – Friday

Closed Saturday and Sunday