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Topic: Fifty Ways to Love Your Lever... |
Ben Banville
From:
Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, USA
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Posted 11 Apr 2012 9:31 am |
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I was thinking of adding a couple of string pulls to my lap steel using either levers or pedals. I'd appreciate any ideas anyone has about how to approach this. PHOTOS of how it was done would be greatly appreciated. here's a pic of the lap steel I want to alter. It's mounted on a pine board and fitted with plumbing hardware for legs. I'm wondering if I should go with knee levers or pedals. The best thing would be to approach this with as much information as i can track down so i don't find myself "up the creek without a pedal"! ' '
It all starts off with a coat hanger...one pull and you're hooked! |
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Ransom Beers
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Posted 11 Apr 2012 9:59 am
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| Holler at Zane King about that,or take a look at some of his you tube vids.He has a lap/strat ( on a stick) that has peedles. |
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Mark van Allen
From:
Watkinsville, Ga. USA
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Posted 11 Apr 2012 10:01 am
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Not much help on creating a lever, but I'd like to offer my nomination for best thread title of 2012... 
_________________
Stop by the Steel Store at: www.markvanallen.com
www.musicfarmstudio.com |
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Bent Romnes
From:
London,Ontario, Canada
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Posted 11 Apr 2012 10:44 am
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Ben, you sure are devoted! You can't wait til you get the BenRom..no sir, you have to experiment with coat hangers.HAHA. By the time you get pedals, you'll be all set; just a matter of putting the now theroetic pedals into action!
Please look up my "Lower 3 and 6" thread in Pedal Steel. It's related to this thread.
_________________
BenRom Pedal Steel Guitars
https://www.facebook.com/groups/212050572323614/ |
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Ben Banville
From:
Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, USA
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Posted 11 Apr 2012 11:12 am
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ransom, i'll have to look up the zane link, sounds great!
mark, thanks for the nomination!
hi bent, like i said in a recent email, i'm a member of the AIR PEDAL ASSOCIATION, but hopefully not for much longer. no matter how much i try to make it cry or sing on the lap steel, it just ain't the same without being able to push them pedals to the metal! i have a real craving to hear those intervals bended up and down in high lonesome rarefied atmospheres. i just can't lever be, i gotta have me a PSG! |
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Donny Hinson
From:
Glen Burnie, Md. U.S.A.
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Posted 11 Apr 2012 2:40 pm
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Levers would be more compact and simple, but pedals still work better for fast moves, and for playing stability. How involved you want to get, as far as changes go, is what will determine how much work it will be. Early "conversion" pedal steels were mostly just plungers in the keyhead which pulled the strings down. Crude, but they worked for many players when all they wanted to do was change an E chord to an A chord. Changes requiring lowers will require additional parts (springs and stops) to pull the strings back up once they're been lowered.
It's a good amount of work that requires some basic tools and fabricating skills to make things work properly. |
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Len Amaral
From:
Rehoboth,MA 02769
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Posted 11 Apr 2012 4:03 pm
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I always loved that Paul Simon tune  I second the motion on the thread title.
Lenny |
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Bob Cox
From:
Buckeye State
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Posted 11 Apr 2012 6:58 pm
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| Ben they make a palm changer now in Europe. I forget the name but it is a tail piece type. You can pull several strings together, or seperate .I think if you do a search it will come up.i thought about putting one on a dobro. Try Dusenburg, I'm thinking thats the co. |
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Ron Whitworth
From:
Yuma,Ariz.USA Yeah they say it's a DRY heat !!
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Posted 11 Apr 2012 7:52 pm
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Hello Ben;
Here is the bridge with the benders that Bob is referring to.
I think it will work for you ... Ron
http://www.duesenbergusa.com/store/index.php?route=product/category&path=34
_________________
"Tone is in the hands. Unless your wife will let you buy a new amp. Then it's definitely in that amp."
We need to turn the TWANG up a little
It's not what you play through, it's what you play through it.
They say that tone is all in the fingers...I say it is all in your head
Some of the best pieces of life are the little pieces all added up..Ron
the value of friendship. Old friends shine like diamonds, you can always call them and - most important - you can't buy them. |
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Danny Bates
From:
Fresno, CA. USA
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Posted 11 Apr 2012 10:57 pm
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Bad News:
You don't have enough room behind the bridge to do anything effective with a palm-style bender.
Good News:
You can take almost any electric guitar and just put a nut-riser and a Bigsby Palm pedal on it. The stronger the pickups the better.
Then just get a volume pedal and plug it into that sweet AC-30.
With that stand, I'd use a piece of foam for supporting the neck flat and let the headstock hang off the edge. You don't want pressure on the back of the headstock.
Tune your guitar to an open E chord (some use E7) and bend string 2 (up 2 frets) and string 3 (up 1 fret) and you can play an amazing amount of country licks with just this rig. Have fun  |
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Ron Whitworth
From:
Yuma,Ariz.USA Yeah they say it's a DRY heat !!
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Posted 12 Apr 2012 1:55 am
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oops - I did not look behind the rear bridge -
Danny is correct on all of the points he made.
Ron
_________________
"Tone is in the hands. Unless your wife will let you buy a new amp. Then it's definitely in that amp."
We need to turn the TWANG up a little
It's not what you play through, it's what you play through it.
They say that tone is all in the fingers...I say it is all in your head
Some of the best pieces of life are the little pieces all added up..Ron
the value of friendship. Old friends shine like diamonds, you can always call them and - most important - you can't buy them. |
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Mike Perlowin
From:
Los Angeles CA
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Ben Banville
From:
Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, USA
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Posted 12 Apr 2012 4:12 am
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i'm gonna blame jon blackstone for giving me a case o' the "bends"... http://bb.steelguitarforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=221688&highlight= ...it all looks so simple, drill hole, attach coat hanger to pedal, put some kinda bushing on the "rod", tune 'er up, 'n bend away on them strings til it makes that wolf-howlin'-at-the-door cryin' sound! (or something like that) evidently, there's more to it than that! like donny said..."It's a good amount of work that requires some basic tools and fabricating skills to make things work properly." one reason i was hoping to get PHOTOS of people's rube goldberg-like contraptions was to get ideas on methodology.
thanks bob and ron for the palm bender suggestion...i knew about the deusenberg "palm pilot", but it's a bit pricey, and danny's right, it won't fit the lap dawg.
danny, i put a piece of wood under the neck that's just the right "heighth" so the lap steel doesn't rock back and forth, and the headstock floats. i've got it tuned to E F# G# B E G# (low to high) to simulate the inner six of the E9 tuning, so everything i'm playing on that neck will translate to the actual pedal steel i hope to receive next month. (bent romnes is building one for me up in ontario.) http://benrom.com/index.php
it's a challenge trying to make a lap steel sound like a pedal steel, but i'm working on it every day and have come up with a few approaches...for instance, with a forward slant in the second position above the I chord, it's possible to slide the lower of the two notes forward while sliding the whole thing one fret higher to get to the straight bar on the IV chord. the backward slants are harder to play with tonal accuracy but give an even closer pedal steel sound when the higher note is brought into alignment with the lower note, it's great practice for the ears, and it may come in handy to be able to do slant bar technique on an actual pedal steel.
mike..."Why don't you just go buy a real pedal steel guitar? Sooner or later you're going to want one. Why wait?" i'm finally getting around to it after decades of waiting!...and i've wanted one ever since first hearing judy collins sing "someday soon", but it wasn't judy's lovely voice that floored me, it was buddy emmons that got my emotions all fired up. (i probably would have had a steel by now, but have been sidetracked on six string guitar for the last 47 years.)
which brings up an interesting question...is there more than ONE studio take of judy's "someday soon"? recently, a friend of mine made a copy of the song for me from the album, and although i hadn't heard the original for decades, i recall a different take than the album version. could it have been re-cut for release as a single? this would certainly account for the different version i hear in my head.
thanks, to all you gentlemen for all the great responses! |
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steve takacs
From:
beijing, china via pittsburgh (deceased)
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Posted 14 Apr 2012 5:47 pm Carpet watch
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| OFF TOPIC I know but is that carpet an old Iranian Baluchi? Nice abash, steve t |
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Thom Ferman
From:
Las Vegas, NV, USA
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Posted 17 Apr 2012 8:39 am
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Speaking of "rube goldberg-like contraptions", I guess it's time to repost this classic
From what I understand it plays and stays in tune!
_________________
Thom Ferman
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