Who plays blues on pedal steel. Alt tuning?

Jaclyn Jones · From: Texas, USA

Just started playing some blues with a new band and playing around with psg. It is a blast but wondered if anyone used other tunings that E9 or C6? Mr. Green

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John Groover McDuffie · From: LA California, USA

You can do a lot of blues in those two tunings.

For some real fun get yourself a 6-string lap steel and tune it to open E (or the equivalent in whatever key you prefer) low to high 1 5 1 3 5 1.

Dave Grafe · From: Hudson River Valley NY

I do a ton of blues work with my E9 S-10, for me it is mostly about working the dominant 7 and 7+9 positions, it helps to keep a "dirty" tone thing going, too....

Jaclyn Jones · From: Texas, USA

I have a Peavey power slide and already use that but the Mullen G2 adds a whole new dimension for me.
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Lots of guitars, banjos, mandos and a Mullen G2-D10,PAC D10, 1966 Marlen D10,Line6 x3 Pro, Peavey Powerslide, Michael Kelly Dobro and a "Fox Vintage Amp" model 5F8A. Oh Yea, a very patient husband.

Mike Perlowin · From: Los Angeles CA

I do sometimes. Here is a video of me playing with a blues-rock band in 2002

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkSnoeTWR4I

I play a U-12, and have changes on the bass strings, including dropping the low B string to A. This song was in the key of A, and I basically worked out of the pedals down position. You can hear how I used that low A note to great effect.

On this tune I used an Electro-Harmonix Big Muff, going through an MXR 6 band equalizer on a loop.

BTW the drummer here is Steve Duncan from the Desert Rose band. Steve mostly does country gigs, but likes to rock out from time to time.
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Mike Perlowin · From: Los Angeles CA

I've said this before but it bears repeating. If you want to play blues on a steel, you ought to listen to, and as much as possible, emulate the great Mississippi Delta Bottleneck players, and of these, the greatest (in my opinion) was Fred McDowell.

Fortunately McDowell recorded a lot. There's lots of CDs of his work available.
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Stu Schulman · From: Ulster Park New Yawk (deceased)

Jaclyn,I play blues on an E9th. Winking

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John Billings · From: Ohio, USA

1--F-----------------G
2--C--------------------D
3--F#? (haven't decided yet. I keep trying different notes)*
4--G--------A---------------G#
5--D--E
6--B-----C------C#
7--G--------A---------------G#
8--D--E
9--G------------------------G#
10-D--E--C

I gotta get that Shobud S-10, Rack and barrel guitar back out and start foolin' with it again. 6 pedals and 2 knees, so there's all kindsa stuff available. Very bottlenecky sounding tuning. Great for Blues!
Open is off course G
Pedal A gives E minor, and with RKR gives E major(both great tunings for bottleneck!)
Pedals A and B give the 4 chord, C.
You can see how it goes. Nothing set in stone yet. Just goofin' with one of my spare guitars.
* May even move strings 10 thru 4 up to 9 thru 3, and add something else for the 10th string.

Larry Bressington · From: Nebraska

Open G, with 6 strings on back neck!
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b0b · From: Cloverdale, CA, USA

I've tried a lot of copedents, Jaclyn, and they all work really well for blues lead parts. Where they differ is in the rhythm department. The sacred steel players developed their E7 with two middle E strings so that they could strum major, minor and 7th chords with their thumb. It's the best "comping" system for blues rhythm parts, in my opinion.

Here's a link to my article about it:
http://b0b.com/tunings/sacredsteel.html
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Ryan Barwin · From: Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

Sometimes I use C6 for blues, but I usually play on E9, in the pedals down position. The BC pedals position is good for blues too.
As Mike Perlowin said, listen to blues slide players like Fred McDowell and copy that stuff.
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David Mason · From: Cambridge, MD, USA

C6th works great, lots of slants without and with pedals. You have to block and skip strings well. It ain't the tuning, though....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zX06XkUhkbs&feature=related

Check out the crazy lick at 2:30 - learn that first! 4:00... 5:10.... Whoa!

J Fletcher · From: London,Ont,Canada

I don't really want to play bottleneck or slide style on the PSG. I'm trying to figure out single string playing in the vein of T-Bone Walker, BB King, etc. The e's lowered position has lots of potential. Just trying to wrap my brain around it.

Ben Jones · From: Seattle, Washington, USA

E9th, some lower the tenth string to E.

John Billings · From: Ohio, USA

--Actually the tuning I'm goofin' with is excellent for the styles you're looking for, plus you get the good bottleneck stuff too.
--Note that the first two strings, with their associated pulls are the most basic, and most common of the Blues bends. The flatted 7th bending up to the root, and the 4th bending up to the 5th.
--Note also that using the first pedal pulls the 5th string D up to E, and making the 5th, 6th, and 7th strings eggs ackley like the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd stings on a 6-string guitar.
-- Maybe I'll try making my third string an E. That way, the 3rd,6th, 7th, and 8th would be the same as the first four strings of a guitar.
-- And ya still have all that good, meaty bottleneck stuff.

Rick Schacter · From: Portland, Or.

I've been playing some rock and blues using E9.
I recently purchased a ceramic bar from Jay Seibert at our local pedal steel jam.
I think it's great for emulating a bottle neck slide.
I use it with an Ibanez Tube Screamer.

Another name that should be mentioned for bottle neck slide guitar is Duane Allman.

Rick

Jerry Tillman · From: Florida

I will get flamed for this opinion but I don,t like blues on pedal steel all that well.I play guitar ,pedal steel and lap steel and I like blues best on regular guitar or 6 string lap or dobro.Long blues solos on pedal steel with the repeatting lines commons to a lot of blues just don,t do it for me.

Dave Mudgett · From: Central Pennsylvania and Gallatin, Tennessee

No flames from me, Jerry. I don't judge music simply by its steel guitar content either, and I think it stands to reason that not all steel players understand blues particularly well, hence the results are not always great.

But I do think that a steel player who understands what blues is about can make a pedal steel sound great in the style. Curly Chalker comes to mind first - he had the one of the most uncanny blues sensibilities I've ever heard, coming from a strong jazz-blues approach on C6. But I think more gutbucket blues can be handled well on steel, especially E9.

In terms of E9 - I think an extra change to either drop string 7 from F# to E or raise string 7 from F# to G (or perhaps both) removes the rhythm guitar problem. I guess I slightly prefer E9/B6 universal since it doesn't have the low 3rd - it has the E/B/E root-fifth power chords on strings 10-8 like on slide guitar. In fact, with string 7 lowered from F# to E, strings 10-3 are simply an extended version of open-E slide guitar tuning - E, B, E, E, G#, B, E, G#. Now add to that just the AB pedals down Amaj with its associated dom7/dom9 chords by toggling the E=>Eb lever and A/B pedals plus the A+F combination, toggling the A pedal between C# and C#dom7 open chords. To me, all of this is a slide guitarist's dream: three ways up and down the neck to get at the basic blues slide guitar patterns in a particular key without having to ever slant the bar.

Of course, there is much, much more possible on a typically equipped E9 pedal steel. The only danger is that you might get some hard-nosed 'blues nazi' folks to complain if you ever venture out of the blues-pentatonic modality. But that never bothered me, I do it on guitar too.

Then there's C6, which of course opens up yet more options. I don't really think anybody needs to come up with new tunings to play blues - pedal steel is already a slide-guitar-on-steroids by any stretch of the imagination, to my tastes.

I'll hopefully get to work some of this in with my old blues band's 20th anniversary reunion gig - http://www.elkcreekcafe.net/index.php/20100520318/Events/TRIPLE-A-BLUES-BAND.html. It'll be mostly guitar (acoustic first set), but if there's room on the stage, I'd like to play some steel. I left this band several years back, not long after I started playing pedal steel (wonder if there's any correlation, LOL) - should be interesting.

Mike Perlowin · From: Los Angeles CA

b0b · From: Cloverdale, CA, USA

If you play a U-12 (E9/B6), you can get all of the blues rhythm benefits of the sacred steel copedent by adding a pedal or lever to lower the middle F# to E.
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Rick Schacter · From: Portland, Or.

J Fletcher · From: London,Ont,Canada

Well there's a great "blues" solo on Duanne Eddy's Fireball Mail, played by Buddy Emmons. Very guitar like in character.
It's not the tuning that determines if it's blues or not, it's the ideas and how they are executed. Of course the quick and dirty method is to get a distorted sound, and do your impression of Elmore James. Or George Thoroughgood.
There are many blues styles, some sophisticated, some very primitive. The song determines your approach. Most references to blues seem to usually mean bluesy rock, kinda like Stevie Ray. That would be the most popular blues style, I would guess.

John Ummel · From: Arlington, WA.

There's a great pentatonic blues scale available on the E9th two frets back from the "pedals up" major chord:Key of A blues scale at the 3rd fret pedals down, root on the 7th string. (But one example) don't fall into the trap of thinking you need a different tuning/setup for every style of music. Much more important to LISTEN to the style you want to play, get that sound in your head, and you'll be able to reproduce it on the tuning you are familiar with.

b0b · From: Cloverdale, CA, USA

A lot of pedal steel players overdo the 'distortion' aspect when trying to play blues. It really doesn't take very much overdrive to get a good blues tone.

Frankly, I hate it when steel players "crank up the fuzz". Sounds cheezy. Read about tube amps and distortion units in the Electronics section of the forum. Some of our members are real knowledgeable about this.
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Dean Parks · From: Sherman Oaks, California, USA

b0b, true about overdone overdrive. With steel, sustain is so good that really saturated overdrive just becomes like a bumblebee.

Inducing less sustain with a different bar helps a lot, such as a Matchbro bar or one of those ceramic bars, which are great for overdrive. It's more guitar-like when there is a real arc to the note... I think Elmore James used an archtop for a lot of his recordings, which means, lousy sustain... so the sustain has to be performed with vibrato, so that slide noise comes through.

Also, volume pedal before the overdrive is good too. Volume pedal becomes more of a drive control... but when I do that, the pedal is easily reachable by right hand, so the output level can be tweaked as needed.

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