Is it really me?

Larry Behm · From: Mt Angel, Or 97362

Sometimes when I am playing I get so caught up in the great sound of the steel it is like I am just a spectator soaking it all in not the one playing. Just going along for the ride, detached from the one actually doing the playing. Oh how I still love the sound.

Larry Behm
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'70 D10 Black fatback Emmons PP, Hilton VP, BJS bars, Boss GE-7 for Dobro effect, Zoom MS50G, Planet Wave cables, Quilter 202 Toneblock, Telonics 15” speaker.

Phone: 971-219-8533

Ken Campbell · From: Ferndale, Montana

It's not just you. I was pondering this very thing this evening. I played out last night and while I wasn't particularly brilliant, there were a few moments where I got to step aside and watch the guitar play itself.

Lane Gray · From: Topeka, KS

I've heard that called "In the zone." You can't really make it happen, it's just a certain happening when things are just right.
First time I ever heard of it, Mike Auldridge was talking about a particular night at the Birchmere, where he was especially on fire. He said at the break "I can't play some of this stuff!! I'm just watching the Dobro and trying to take notes, hoping I can remember it later."
I love it when that happens. It makes up for those nights when "I just washed my hands, and can't do a thing with them."
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2 pedal steels, a lapStrat, and an 8-string Dobro (and 3 ukes)
More amps than guitars, and not many effects

Henry Matthews · From: Texarkana, Ark USA

I think sometimes steel players just play for themselves because you are not going to amaze the lead guitar player or the drummer. One Sat night we were doing Ray Price's, Old Love Letters, sorta swingy. I took two rides, one E 9th then let the guitar player do his little thing then I took another ride on C6th. I was really in the zone that night, played some fast licks plus some full cords that made chills down my spine and I'm the only one that noticed. I don't believe I could ever match what I did that night but doesn't make any difference anyway cause nobody notices. Sad

Can't do it playing a steel show where people will notice, I'm too nervous,LOL.

What really gets me though is the guitar player can play the Johnny B Good kick (which I've Been Playing since I was 15) and everybody looks. Man can that dude play?????
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Henry Matthews

D-10 Magnum, 8 &5, dark rose color
D-10 1974 Emmons cut tail, fat back,rosewood, 8&5
Nashville 112 amp, Fishman Loudbox Performer amp, Hilton pedal, Goodrich pedal,BJS bar, Kyser picks, Live steel Strings. No effects, doodads or stomp boxes.

Herb Steiner · From: Spicewood TX 78669

Mike Schwartzman · From: Maryland, USA

I love it if and when that happens, Larry. I experienced it at last Thursday's rehearsal. It was just for a moment or two.

I think it is a product of Lane's post about "being in the Zone" and Herb's post about playing with musicians that listen with "Ensemble Ears". That is, musicians who listen to each other in the moment. The pocket is solid, all egos are backstage, and it's all about the music.

The Zone opens and it's almost an out of body experience. The notes coming from the PSG fly out clear, timed perfectly, and pretty, and it's almost like someone else is playing the steel. I said to myself last Thursday..."this is way over my head...can't be me". Totally detached.

I'm very fortunate to play with these musicians, and this experience does not usually pop up for me while practicing or while playing alone. I wish it did, but hey, I'll take it anytime.
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Emmons Push Pull, BMI, Session 400, Home of the Slimcaster Tele.

Jim Hartley · From: SC/TN

Hey Herb,

I'm glad you chimed in about other players appreciating what you do. I am so fortunate that I get to work with some outstanding steel players and I sometimes lose myself in what they are doing. Not a great thing when you're supposed to be reading the chart. Then again, most great players will lead you right where they want you to go anyway. As you can see from my avatar, I don't always understand what they're doing, but I sure do love it.

Jack Bowman · From: Washington, USA

One evening I got out the fiddle that Bill Oconnor gave to me. ( He was Loretta Lynn's first fiddle player for 6 years when she was in Darlington Washington) I started on the "Orange Blossom" just to warm up. It sounded as if old Bill was talking to me thru that fiddle. I can't play those licks. Bill played base behind my guitar and vocals for 2 years at the time that he passed away. We all, who knew that guy do miss him. He was a good steeler too.
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5220 Gretsch
Godin A-6
Godan 5th Ave.
Fender 400 PSG 4+2
buncha amps

Henry Matthews · From: Texarkana, Ark USA

Herb, we have a few guitarist and piano players around here that do appreciate the steel guitar but very very few. I would say about two of each but this town is totally different than where you guys play. I work with ten people in our office that don't know and have never heard of Johnny Bush, Ray Price , Faron Young, Gene Watson, and the list goes on. Believe me, even though most of these guys are good musicians, you aren't going to impress them and they aren't going to compliment what you are playing.
I'm lucky to have two in my band that do appreciate good county and swing music and we do compliment each other but the rest could care less. Just as long as they can play louder and more than you, their happy. Oh, and kick off all the songs too, I don't care if it is Crazy Arms.
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Henry Matthews

D-10 Magnum, 8 &5, dark rose color
D-10 1974 Emmons cut tail, fat back,rosewood, 8&5
Nashville 112 amp, Fishman Loudbox Performer amp, Hilton pedal, Goodrich pedal,BJS bar, Kyser picks, Live steel Strings. No effects, doodads or stomp boxes.

Rick Schacter · From: Portland, Or.

I've had this experience with 6 string guitar many times, but not very often with pedal steel.

One of the times where I actually did have this experience with pedal steel, Bob Muller came up to the stage and said "I couldn't hear your pedal steel". Oh Well

Knocked me right off of cloud 9. LOL!

Rick

Gary C. Dygert · From: Frankfort, NY, USA

Psychologists call it flow. It can happen in music, sports, (gasp) sex, and many other activities. You're outside yourself, and time seems to have no meaning. It's a beautiful thing.

David Mason · From: Cambridge, MD, USA

I've spent a fair amount of time recently going over what are "known" to be classic solos (or the vehicles for them) in a variety of different musical styles, including some that I'm not that fond of. What strikes me time and again is that the arrangement around the soloist - what the other guys are doing to back the soloist - is critical. In a larger band, 4-plus people, you really need the permission of the others to let fly, whether it's conscious on their part or not. One of the great joys of the internet to me is sugarmegs.org:

http://tela.sugarmegs.org/_asxtela/

I am "forced" to use the computer at least a few hours a day, and they have some 34,000+ streaming concerts. And you can even pick up the changing solos and the variations in the arrangements behind them over the course of five or eight shows. I mean, for example, McCoy Tyner just plain shut up when Coltrane took a ride in the 1961-1964 band. He knew enough to know that he didn't know enough, or just didn't need to offer up any harmonic encouragement to John Coltrane, not when that guy entered that zone. "Permission to solo" is a near-universal characteristic of the bands of great soloists.

When SRV was going into the slower, tortured-microtonic slow blues solos like "Texas Flood", Tommy Shannon backed down his bass playing to root-only. Maybe a fifth prefacing a chord change, never a third, flat-three or sixth. When Duane Allman entered his free-fly zone in "You Don't Love Me", bassist Berry Oakley was the only one who felt comfortable in there, except when Dickey Betts did lay on some near-impossible improvised thirds-based guitar harmonies (I never believed those who said that "Live at the Fillmore" was an average or even sub-par Allman Brothers show, until I heard it myself on sugarmegs). There are a number of sections of 1976-1977 Grateful Dead "improvisation" that I'm sure are worked out note-for-note - a "jam band" who eased their way out of jamming starting in 1976). There's a few hundred Miles Davis recordings from 1949 to 1991, and it's fairly fascinating (to me... Rolling Eyes

) to hear him nudging around the harmony of his soloists in the 1980's with keyboard "suggestions."

I'll say it again - "Permission to solo" is a near-universal characteristic of the bands of great soloists. Traditionally steel players are rarely the band leader, which would go a long way towards explaining the relative paucity of recordings of really ripsnortin' and developing steel guitar solos, on an instrument which we all agree is capable of it. Hey, put Buddy Emmons (at least half-) in charge, and you get "Redneck Jazz" w/Danny Gatton, if ever there was a band that should of stayed together... Crying or Very sad

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