Pedal Steel Music

Hello fellow players,

Bob Hempker sitting in for Bobbe Seymour again.

Gospel music has many different sub-categories. For example, Contemporary Christian, Negro Spirituals, Protestant Hymns, Catholic Chants as well as most Christmas Carols are Gospel based.

Many famous singers had Gospel roots, for example Elvis Presley and Aretha Franklin spring immediately to mind. Donna Summer had Gospel roots and she returned to Gospel after her disco career.

James Brown and Billy Preston both started in Gospel. I saw Billy Preston in concert in Reno, Nevada in the 80’s and I was astonished at how great a Hammond B3 organ player he was.

It’s difficult to brand any type of religious music because of the variety and the diverse artists that perform it. We are now seeing more and more steel guitar being used performing Gospel music. Steel guitar is highly featured in Gospel music the way it was in country music twenty or thirty years ago.

There are some steel guitar players who make a good living playing on Gospel recordings especially because so much Gospel music is recorded in Nashville. For example, well-known steel player Sonny Garrish can be heard playing on The Hinson’s recordings which has a country flair. Scott Sanders, a little known player can also be heard on a lot modern of Gospel recordings.

I recommend that you listen to Sonny Garrish on The Hinson’s recordings because not only is it great steel playing but it’s also something you can from. Sonny always plays the right thing at the right spot and is a very well rounded player. Sonny can play as hot as he wants or as sweet and slow as he wants.

Gospel music can be very soothing or very invigorating. The modal scales that we use out of the major scale that we use in all kinds of music were originally created in the middle ages for Catholic Church music. Much of classical music came out of the Catholic music. Jazz came out of classical which has influenced practically every other style of music.

Getting back to steel guitar, a young man named Robert Randolph comes to mind. Bobbe Seymour introduced me to Robert and his father about twenty five years ago. They came in Bobbe’s store when Robert was a young lad learning to play.

Robert is also known as a Rhythm & Blues player. Whatever the case, he is very entertaining to watch and listen to play. He has a totally different approach to playing steel guitar than anyone else. It is refreshing to hear a young person using steel guitar is this particular music genre.

Whether you want to play Gospel music professionally, you just want to play in church or at home for your own amusement and pleasure, the steel guitar can provide a wonderful expression of this music.

Albert E. Brumley Jr. has written hundreds of Protestant hymns such as “I’ll Fly Away”, “Turn Your Radio On”, “If We Ever Meet Again This Side Of Heaven”. Mr. Brumley’s son, Tom Brumley is one of my all-time favorite steel players. Tom was a wonderful gentleman and a dear friend. It was a great loss to steel guitar when we lost him a few years ago. I guess we could say Tom Brumley came out of Gospel music. You can hear the Gospel influence especially in Tom’s playing of ballads.

During the fifteen years I was in Branson, I worked a few Gospel shows and I’ve always enjoyed myself playing those shows because the music is either pretty or happy or both and lends itself wonderfully to a steel guitar. Anything that you play in any other type of music can be incorporated into your Gospel playing.

We have many people come into the store wanting to learn to play steel guitar because they heard somebody play in church and it impressed them by how our beautiful instrument sounds. Playing Gospel music in church is an excellent outlet for your music if you’re not one to go play in bars, nightclubs and such.

Sit down at your guitar and start playing “Amazing Grace”, “The Old Rugged Cross” or any standard hymn and see where that takes you. You’ll find yourself coming up with all sorts of ideas. These songs just lend themselves so well to steel guitar that they’re one of the coolest things to practice on.

Any time spent practicing Gospel music is time well spent because as I said earlier, all forms of modern Western civilization music evolved from the church music of the middle ages.

I would recommend listening to Bobbe’s “At The Feet Of God” CD to hear how beautiful and uplifting Gospel music can be at the hands of a master player. It will give you something to aspire to.

I just finished watching Bobbe’s Gospel DVD. It really touches on many basic all-around steel guitar techniques. This DVD is very useful no matter what style of music you want to play. He really explains right hand technique, left hand technique, volume pedal technique, tuning, the ins and outs of playing in a band.

It’s an excellent choice for those trying to further develop their steel guitar skills as are all of Bobbe’s DVDs on his website www.steelguitar.net/videos.html and I’m not saying that just because I work with 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

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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,

Bob Hempker standing in for Bobbe Seymour again.

First let me answer a question from Paul Vendemmia. Paul wanted me to explain tick-tack. Harold Bradley was the man that played on thousands of recording sessions in Nashville for years and he was the go to guy for tick tack. Also Leon Rhodes played a lot of tick tack on recordings and played tick tack on the Opry for 30 plus years.

Jerry Byrd also played tick tack on many recordings. That’s how Jerry kept working when pedals came along. They quit using him in studios for steel guitar so he made his living playing acoustic rhythm or tick tack after the pedal sound become popular.

Tick tack is a term used for playing a Danelectro baritone guitar through usually a Fender Princeton amp with the treble turned up. It’s played with a straight pick with a popping sound to it and is played duplicating the line of the bass.

It is more effective with an acoustic upright bass than it is with an electric bass. This is somewhat the foundation of the old Nashville sound.

If you want to play tick tack onstage, use the lower strings on your C6 neck. They’re more in the same register as the baritone guitar. Play in unison with the bass player. It makes the bass sound punchier, especially an upright bass, because an upright has a softer tone and doesn’t sustain as long as an electric bass.

If I’m in a bigger band, I’ll play tick tack with the bass rather than just sit there and look around. You do have to use discretion because some songs sound better than other songs do with this.

If you want to play tick tack in the studio, hire someone to play tick tack or if you have a Danelectro baritone guitar or can borrow one, overdub it yourself. Better yet, play it on the basic track with the rhythm section and overdub your steel.

We got an interesting reply to the newsletter about C6th playing that we’d like to share with you. Here it is.

Bob and Bobbe,

As I watched the top tier players work their magic I noticed they play more on top of the guitar than with the pedals. Most of them started or studied deeply the C6 tuning.

To me, the biggest difference between C6 and E9 is bar movement. Many E9 players quickly discover you can play all of the scales at one fret by using pedals. On C6 to play “Do, Re, Mi” minor, pentatonic, blues, dim, or any scale…you pretty much have to move the bar.

In my own experience looking up all that stuff and jamming along with tracks and other players with interest in jazz or swing music only added to my E9 playing. That same bar movement that must be used on C6 adds wonderful, interesting, and mood grabbing tonal changes to E9. You can’t get much of that punching pedals.

Another point I notice in new players. Because the instrument is tuned in a chord (I guess) they often try to play chorded melodies, big triad slides, and other things that aren’t related to the melody, but seem to be natural or easy on steel guitar. Chet Atkins once said “If my mother walked in, in the middle of an instrumental, I’d like for her to know what song I was playing.” IMHO melody or the melodic echo of the vocal are the most essential thing any player can bring to the song. During a solo it reminds the audience of the song, during the vocal it drives in or hooks the lyric. Tom Brumley didn’t play a line from Roley Poley after Buck sang “Together Again…” If a player can play melody, he can work any market.

Another way to look at it is this: there are 88 keys on a piano, all the notes are there to play any chord or melody, old or new. If a pianist walks up to the piano and with two fists plays all the notes he can, most would agree thats not musical. Same for the steel. I try to find the notes I want to play and leave the rest out.

I hope Bobbe gets to feeling well again. I had my spine fused in late April and while the afflicted area is fixed nothing else seems to be as it once was. I guess getting old isn’t for sissies.

Ron Carpenter

I agree with everything that Ron has to say. We appreciate all the questions and feedback we get from everyone so keep them coming. It’s your questions that determine the subjects we cover in this newsletter.

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,

Bob Hempker standing in for Bobbe Seymour once again.

Let’s talk about C6th today. The original C6 tuning was developed in 1939 by Jerry Byrd. It was a six string tuning. E, C, A, G, E, C. Later on, Jerry added a seventh string which he tuned to a C# in order to get an A major chord open along with the Am and the C.

The tuning evolved to eight strings, then ten. Alvino Rey was credited with the standard pedal setup that we now know on the C6th neck.

Jerry was probably everybody’s hero at one time. I didn’t know him real well but we talked often and corresponded right up until he died.

The man who first taught me when I was a kid was Ron Dearth in Lima, Ohio. Ron knew Jerry very well. I don’t know what happened to the recording, but according to Jerry, Ron recorded him on an old wire recorder back in ’39 when Jerry first came up with the tuning.

I think the tuning has been somewhat stereotyped as a jazz/swing type tuning. In reality, the tuning can be used for many different things. Blues, rock n roll, even some country things and many Hawaiian things are played in C6th.

I use it a lot for different rhythm patterns when I’m in a small bar band and there’s no piano player because it makes the band sound fuller than it sounds with an E9th because that lower tuning adds body, fatness or whatever you want to call it. This alone is a good reason to learn C6th.

I’ve also used it to play a tick-tac guitar line with the bass. The old Nashville sound featured an upright bass and a baritone guitar playing tick-tac with the bass. This can be done easily on the C6th neck which is another good reason to learn C6th. You will be more versatile and thus have more to offer the band.

I remember watching Buddy Charleton with Ernest Tubb years ago. He would play part of a song on the C6th neck and then switch to the E9th neck while backing up Ernest Tubb. He would switch back and forth at will. You can’t get much more country than Ernest Tubb.

Some altered and extended chords are harder to play on the E9th because the string groupings are so different from what we’re used to playing. The C6th neck has the advantage that altered and extended chords are easier to play. You have to train your ear to listen for those intervals, but it will add color to your playing when you do. This is another good reason to learn C6th.

A good way to begin learning C6th would be to take the second string through the seventh string, not use any pedals and learn your string groupings, your scales and your chords before you go on. As you’re understanding and playing progresses on the C6th tuning, you can start adding other strings and pedals, gradually, one at a time.

We have to crawl before we can walk, whether it’s E9th, C6th or whatever tuning you use. It’s vital that we have an understanding of the instrument. Again, like any other instrument, we work on our scales, harmonized scales and arpeggios just like we do on the E9th.

You might start out learning a few simple songs like Harbor Lights and Remington Ride. These are songs you can play with no pedals that use the basic tuning and go from there. It’s like anything else, the more you do it, the better you get at it.

Some players down through the years have opted for an A6th or a Bb6th tuning instead of the C6th. They say that it’s a lower and fatter sounding tuning. It’s the same tuning, just tuned lower.

A few of Hank Thompson’s steel guitarists did this because Hank sang a lot of his songs in the key of C. They didn’t want to play the C chord open and used the lower tunings instead where they could play the C chord on the second or third fret.

Don’t be intimidated by the tuning. If you have a C6th neck on your guitar, by all means, keep it tuned and practice on it. You will find yourself wanting to use it more and more.

Again, let me repeat, you should check out Bobbe’s instructional DVDs on his website http://www.steelguitar.net/videos.html There are some excellent instructional materials that we didn’t have years ago when I was first learning and it would have sure made the learning easier. So take advantage of the material that’s available to improve your own playing.

In my opinion, you are the best gadget you can invest in.

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