Pedal Steel Music

Hello fans and fellow players,

This is Bob Hempker subbing for Bobbe Seymour.

I’d like to talk about us developing a certain feel for a personal style of playing. If that sounds a bit confusing, another way of putting it would be the path that we follow in becoming a unique, individual player with our own signature style.

Like it or not, our personality comes out through our playing. We’re stuck with that and there’s really nothing we can do about it except to allow it to flow and use it to our advantage.

I’ve had so many people who have asked me to show them how to play a solo note for note and I have to ask them, why they would want to be me and not themselves.

In the beginning, we all seem to pick out a particular hero or group of heroes. We get absorbed into trying to emulate their styles and many of the solos that they play. I think this is a great thing in the beginning stages as we are falling in love with our instrument.

I’ve always been of the opinion that part of becoming a great musician is falling in love with your particular instrument. It’s that love for the instrument that takes the work out of learning and turns it into play. Work is what you do because you have to. Play is what you do because you want to. It’s love that makes the difference.

As we progress musically, we develop our minds and our ears to where we hear melodies, chords and groups of notes in our own unique way. Rather than to ignore this subliminal level of perception, we need to allow it to flourish. We will always be throughout our playing career a composite of all our heroes, but our own distinctive style will emerge as we progress.

To really feel what we play can’t be taught, it has to be experienced. When I was working with Loretta, I would learn the Hal Rugg solos from her recordings, but after playing them a few times my mind would wander in different directions and I would end up playing them my own way.

In the last 30 years, there have been very few solos that I have copied note for note from anyone. I have stolen a few licks from people and I’ll continue to do so, but I don’t copy things note for note anymore. I feel it’s enhanced my creativity and made me a better, well-rounded player.

Something for you to try is to take a prominent steel guitar solo that everyone can recognize such as Tom Brumley’s Together Again solo or Lloyd Green’s Farewell Party solo. Start into the solo from the way you copied it from the initial recording, then unlock your heart and soul and allow the solo to flow the way you feel.

This will do more for your playing than copying a hundred licks. There’s an old saying that mediocrity thrives on standardization. There is a lot to be said for that. If you play a passage in a song different than the way someone else did on a recording, that doesn’t make it “wrong”, that makes it your solo.

Try approaching whatever you’re going to play in this manner. You will take yourself and your musical ability to a new dimension. Try listening to all genres of music. It doesn’t have to have a steel guitar in it for you to learn something from it.

Expand your listening to more than just steel guitar players. Listen to guitar players, piano players, fiddle players, horn players, anything that has something different to offer your ears. You’ll be amazed at how different you will begin to approach playing your own instrument.

I would like to mention what we call signature licks which are passages of notes placed in different parts of the song that make the song recognizable. This is an extremely important part of commercial style playing which is the kind we all get paid for.

Those signature licks need to be there when you’re playing a commercial gig. We can play however we feel anywhere else in the song, but we need to play the signature licks as they were in the recording.

Even the singer recognizes them and there will be times when we’ll be playing behind a singer that doesn’t have the best timing and they have to hear walkups on the bass and the signature licks to the song to know when to come in with their phrases.

If you find yourself in a recording session, it’s part of your job to come up with a signature lick for the song. Many hits would have never been hits without their signature licks.

A good example would be Jim Vest’s signature lick on Vern Gosdin’s “Set’em Up Joe”. Pete Drake’s lick on Johnny Rodriguez’ “Pass Me By” is another one. How about Pete Drake’s “D.I.V.O.R.C.E” lick on Tammy Wynette’s hit song. There’s also Lloyd Green’s lick on Freddy Hart’s “Easy Lovin'”. This is enough to give you an idea.

I hope these opinions of mine will give you food for thought and help you expand your thinking about your instrument and playing. In the words of my original hero, the immortal Jerry Byrd, “Keep your thump-pick hot.”

As I’ve said previously, one of the best ways I’ve found to get myself thinking outside the box and inspire myself to take my playing in different directions is listening to Bobbe’s CDs because Bobbe has always gone his own way. His style is very prominent and I can’t help but find new ideas each time I listen to him play.

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

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,

Welcome to Steel Guitar Month. September is the designated month for steel guitar and those that love it. It’s a big time for shows, sales and steel guitar work in general. To honor this month, we are going to be doing some very serious discounting.

For those of you that have been waiting for this particular month, I am going over the price of each individual guitar and discounting it to the max that I can. We will also be looking for other products that we can discount as well, like amps and effects.

A little earlier this week, I received a phone call from country music vocalist and legend Stan Hitchcock. His office is about five blocks away from Steel Guitar Nashville. He asked me to come over to see him at the Blue Highways office, which I gladly did.

Stan is one of Nashville’s most appreciated country music singers. As smooth a singer as Jack Daniels Black Label with twice the sense of humor and love for a great country song. He has a show now which is running on the Branson RFD cable TV channel called Heart to Heart.

He also has a company called Blue Highways that produces country music shows. We sat there for about half a day reviewing shows that we had done together from the past. Some of the stars I had totally forgotten how well they sang, like Narvell Felts, David Rogers and many others.

Stan is planning a new show using a lot of this great prerecorded material and I figure we may be recording some new ones soon.

Stan is one of those stars that truly loves steel guitar and loves to feature us. The six piece band that was created for the original shows from Branson musicians was very, very good and I remember most of the musicians went on to great jobs after the show was disbanded.

Gary Myers, the guitar player went to work with Mickey Gilley and Bobby Burkhead on drums went to work with George Jones and has been with him for many, many years.

The fact that Stan is such a good guy and thinks so much of his musicians pretty well guarantees that there will be a lot of instrumental things happening on the new shows. If you’d like to see what Stan has done and is doing you can check out his website at …

www.bluehighwaystv.com

Why not give Stan a hello and let him know you’re interested in seeing this type of music.

Your buddy,
Bobbe

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

We’ve had a crazy week at Steel Guitar Nashville and haven’t been able to get a newsletter together. So I dug back in the achieves and found a good one for 7 years ago.

This is the reprint of that newsletter.

The subject this week is so very important to steel guitarists and I never hear it discussed because most steel players don’t even know what it is.

It’s pedal and knee lever feel. What a guitar feels like has more to do with knee levers and pedal distance and pressures than anything you do with a steel guitar with your hands.

The most common misconception in the difference between a steel guitar that feels good against one that doesn’t is pedal pressure. Most players think that the easier a knee lever or pedal pushes, the better the guitar feels. This is totally untrue. If it were true, all we would need would be electric solenoids in each pedal or knee lever and the pedals and knees could just be switches to make the strings raise and lower. I have played guitars with knee pressure so light that the crease in my jeans will detune the guitar before I can feel the knee lever being pushed. How’s that for lack of feel?

Pedal feel needs to have a certain amount of pressure as I have just explained, if it doesn’t, how can you get half pedals or slow pedaling or snap pedaling. You have to be able to feel the pedals and what they do. Many players like to be able to relax their legs on top of the pedals and not have the affected strings go out of tune when their legs relax.

A pedal should move from three quarters of an inch to an inch in travel. This allows for half pedal and good feel on the strings that just move a half a tone.

Now here’s the most important thing that needs to be understood about pedal feel. Where the pressure comes in, this means does the pedal get increasingly harder to push as you push it down or does it get easier to push as it travels? The big reason that the Sho-Bud fingertip guitars never really felt good was because the pedals pushed real easy in their first quarter inch of travel and then got increasingly hard to push rapidly before they got to the stop. This makes for a very poor pedal feel. The reason the Emmons pushpull guitar is in favor by so many great professional players, is because the pedal pushes no harder at the end of it’s travel than it does at the beginning. It’s like shifting gears in a very expensive European sports car.

Piano players are fanatical about how the keys feel on expensive pianos. Does the key pop back after it is depressed? How easy does the key push and how much feedback does the piano give the player? If piano keys push too easy, they give the player no feedback or feel. In the early days of electronic keyboards, good piano players complained about the lack of feel until the engineers and makers of the electronic keyboards simulated the feel of a real piano by doing what they call adding weighted keys. This feedback is as necessary in steel guitar pedals and knee levers as it is in pianos or other instruments.

With over 50 steel guitars on our showroom floor, the ones that feel best to play are easy to figure out and we have decided that how easy the pedal pushes does not equate to feel or your playing of the instrument better necessarily. It seems that more thought has been put into how a player wears his picks and what kind of plating is on their bars along with what diameter their cords are than the most important thing which is the feedback and feel of the steel guitar itself.

As we all know, tone is brutally important on what a good steel guitarist feels in his instrument. The feedback you get from where you actually contact the guitar, which is pedals and knee levers, is an extremely important point.

Helper springs make pedals push easier and almost never help the feel or feedback of the instrument.

The big thing in this message to remember is a pedal should be setup to push just as easy at the end of it’s travel as it pushes at the beginning of it’s travel. Naturally, this applies to knee levers also.

I can think of two guitars being made today with the pedal action so easy that have no feel at all.

Let’s take a tip from our keyboard friends and have a guitar that we play well, not one that just has pedals that are easy to push.

Check out our monthly specials at 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

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