Pedal Steel Music

Just a quick little newsletter today because I’ve got a lot going on at the moment.

Tip … When playing through two amps with the third ground prong on the AC receptacle, you will always hear an audible hum. Cutting off the ground prong or adding a ground lift adaptor which can be bought at any hardware store, will eliminate the annoying 60 cycle hum. You can also plug everything into the same power strip and then plug only the power strip in thus eliminating the ground loop and the 60 cycle hum.

Tip … I’ve noticed many players are replacing the nylon tuners on their all-pull guitars with tuners that are longer than the stock ones that come from the factory … this gets the tuner out beyond the end of the guitar and makes them much easier to see and faster to tune. I agree with this modification but be careful to pack your guitar in its case in such a way as the tuners are protected from contact with the case. Many guitars automatically have enough space because of the switch on the end of the guitar.

Tip … As several of you may have noticed, when tuning your guitar, if there is a fan in the room or near you, tuning seems to be more difficult. The larger the blades on the fan and the slower the fan is turning, the more it seems to affect your ability to hear the strings in perfect tune. This happens very often in the summer on stages or in clubs where there can be fans blowing on the band. To illustrate this point, a Leslie tone cabinet that has a rotating speaker you will notice, actually raises and lowers the pitch of the note due to the Doppler effect of the moving speaker. It is not just the noise of the fan but the way it actually affects the pitch to your ear. To sum up, make sure the air around you is still or else use a good tuner when in an ear-unfriendly environment.

Bobbe Seymour

www.steelguitar.net
info@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
Second and Third Saturday each Month Open 9AM – 2PM
Closed Sunday

The internet in general, because of YouTube, Facebook and computer technology in general is really giving us a place to showcase the talent and abilities we all have. I have gotten messages from people whom I have heard are really great players and then I contact them and ask them what they have done with their great playing talent, they tell me, “I just play in church or just play and record myself around the house.” The internet allows you to share your talent with the world instead of just your dog.

This is wonderfully fascinating to me because it shows me what I have suspected all along. That is that many of you are truly great players but have devoted yourselves to a great family life instead of life on the road and are using your versatile abilities to make a good living in another field.

All this computer and video steel guitar madness has proved to me in recent months that there is incredible talent from the world that we would never otherwise been aware of.

It took me a long time to warm up to computer technology, but because of the friends that I have heard play steel guitar and strangers alike, along with the vast amount of friends that I have met because of this technology, I not only have warmed up to it, but am finally embracing it whole-heartedly.

All this silly electronic weirdness has brought the great family of steel guitar much closer together and is still continuing to do so.

A subject that’s very important that has not come up very often is pedal width and pedal spacing. As most of you know, in many guitars over the years as “improvements” were made by the manufacturers, pedal widths and pedal spacing have changed. These things are governed by how many pedals you have, shoe width and the shape of the end of the pedal whether flat or rounded.

Generally speaking, the wider the pedal at the business end where you push it down, the wider the spacing between the pedals should be. Bigsby pedals are very wide and are a pretty large distance apart. The Emmons LeGrandes are narrower pedals and closer together than the older original Emmons guitars.

A big factor in how comfortable a guitar is to you when you sit down behind it is how these pedal dimensions pertain to you, your style and your foot size. I am not comfortable at all personally on a guitar with very narrow spacing. Two and a half inches apart is too close for me. Two and three quarters to three inches is much more comfortable.

I have seen Sho-Buds with the narrow pedals with wide spacing and my foot will almost go between the pedals. Most of the narrow pedal Sho-Bud guitars are very comfortable to me.

I personally really love the Emmons guitars built from ’64 to ’72. They have quarter inch wider pedal spacing and quarter inch wider pedals. These guitars are very comfortable.

I have had several guitars in the past that had pedal spacing that was too narrow. By trimming the sides of the pedal generously, I have made the guitars very playable and comfortable.

There are many little things that add up to make a steel guitar feel comfortable and feel like it’s part of you. Anytime you have a steel guitar that feels like it’s an extension of your body, you have a good guitar.

We have a new Standel boutique steel guitar amplifier for sale. This is the type that was used by such players as Maurice Anderson, Buddy Emmons, Buddy Charlton, the whole Hank Thompson band with the steel players that worked for him.

These are extremely high quality, military-grade hand-wired point to point amplifiers. This is two colored amplifier in beige and sea foam with a D-130 JB Lancing speaker. Controls panels on the front and back like the dashboard in an automobile. Has separate single input jack for.

This is the top of the line Standel amp using four 6L6GT tubes. This amplifier retails for $7900. Wholesale is $3900 and we are selling this amp at wholesale. It has the full warranty just the way it came out of the shipping crate. This is today’s finest amplifier available for steel guitar. Just like all other amplifiers, the price will always be going up. You can’t make a finer investment in the quality of your sound.

Bobbe Seymour

www.steelguitar.net
info@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
Second and Third Saturday each Month Open 9AM – 2PM
Closed Sunday

I want to talk today about the fastest, easiest way to improve your playing and let me explain it by telling you a little story.

When I was learning to fly and handle an airplane, I just couldn’t understand how to master a crosswind landing. I had a good instructor and I was understanding him well, but I just could not get the knack of how to handle a 15 knot crosswind landing. I saw a video tape advertised in an aviation magazine that was titled “Crosswind Landings Made Easy”. I purchased the tape for $39.95 thinking it was very expensive but it turned out to be the cheapest flying investment I ever made.

They put a camera at both ends of the runway. This showed the exact angle the airplane needed to be in as it approached the runway. It showed perfectly how much aileron and rudder needed to be used to accomplish the task. I only had to see the tape one time to get the idea. I drove to the airport, flew my plane to another local airport where the wind was directly across the runway and proceeded to make six of the most perfect landings I’d ever made.

Since this time, I have been an avid fan of instructional videos because I could see what the instructor was trying to tell me. There’s no way I could sit at both ends of the runway and fly the plane at the same time to see what I needed to see. The video did that for me.

I went ahead and invested an additional $300 on a complete video flying course. The art of flying was suddenly mine. It was the videos that put everything together for me. This is what convinced me that learning to play steel could be an easier task with great video instruction. This is the spark that lit my fire for making instructional videos and your acceptance is what keeps the fire burning.

The advantages of videos are that you can play them over and over and you’ll “get” something new every time you see them. If there is something you don’t understand you can play a particular part over and over until you do understand it. Try asking an instructor the same thing over and over without suffering his wrath in one way or another

Not only you, but family members can also learn from a video and of course, at the end of a video’s usefulness to you, it still has value to someone else and you can get a portion of your money back or else, when you finish with the videos, you still have something tangible you can hold in your hand which has value like a fine book. But by far, the greatest thing about a video is if a picture is worth a thousand words, then a moving picture in color with sound has to be worth a million.

A good video can show you where to pick a string, how to pick a string, how to use vibrato and where to put the bar all at the same time rather than telling you how to apply each technique individually and then have you try to merge all these different elements into one fluid motion the way a book discussion would do.

As I said, the fastest, easiest way to improve your playing is by watching instructional videos. See mine at See mine at www.steelguitar.net/videos1.html

Larry Sasser called today and sounded good. Seems we’re both doing a lot better.

Bobbe Seymour

www.steelguitar.net
info@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
Second and Third Saturday each Month Open 9AM – 2PM
Closed Sunday