Lap Steelin'

Conversation with Henry Bogdan, Part 1

Posted on July 26, 2011 by Mike Neer

Henry Bogdan is one of the few players of the modern era who has embraced the National Tricone resonator as his main instrument. His playing with The Moonlighters was particularly influential (especially to myself) in the resurgence of traditional string bands featuring ukulele and steel guitar, and with the Moonlighters he recorded several CDs. He also performed and recorded with Hazmat Modine, a unique NYC band led by the eclectic and multi-talented Wade Schuman. However, Henry is best known for his career as bassist for the band Helmet, an influential alternative metal band, all through the 1990s. These days, Henry resides in the Portland area, where he has been involved with a band called The Midnight Serenaders, continuing the marriage of his Hawaiian stylings with their Jazz Age swing.

Henry told me that after all these years of playing his Tricone, he was putting it away to pursue his latest passion, the Puerto Rican Tres, which is a stringed instrument with 9 strings in 3 courses. So, if you are in the Portland area, don’t miss the opportunity to see Henry perform with his Tricone while you can.

The Moonlighters – It Isn’t Goodnight Yet

Mike: I’ve noticed the phenomenon of musicians who’d previously played Rock music and Punk gravitating toward Roots music.

Henry: Yeah, it’s really true. I kind of saw it as somewhat of a synchronicity to the end of…for me it was the end of Punk. It was the end of the road. I didn’t see that there was any other direction to go.

M: I figured that people who are playing “cutting edge” stuff already, they’re really at the precipice and you have to wonder “where do you go from there?” It must be exhausting to be at that point and constantly be trying to move forward all the time. At some point, it almost seems inevitable that people are going to begin to look backward….

H: Yeah, to get more substance. It just gets sort of totally diluted and you’re not doing anything if you’re trying to be modern and unique and not sound or play like anyone else before you. I always felt the idea was to be unique and not do anything traditional. For Helmet, it just seemed like it was the end of the road and it was up to the next generation to combine their influences and do something new.

Most of my friends continued on with Rock, but I did know a lot of people who were just putting down their instruments and not playing at all. That’s when I met Bliss (Blood) with the Moonlighters and I knew what I wanted to do was create kind of a traditional Hawaiian-sounding band. I didn’t see myself as a “jazzer” and she was coming from a Rock state of mind and not from going to Jazz school or that sort of thing.

M: So, what was your introduction to Hawaiian music?

H: I would say first off that I’ve always been interested in steel guitar, from my mid-teens hearing it in Rock bands like Neil Young, the Eagles—a lot of stuff like that was popular here in Portland and on the west coast. The first time I got to see one up close was actually when this Gospel/Southern-Rock band played at my high school. There was a guy playing a Sho-Bud and I just totally flipped and I went up and I talked to him for a while after the gig. It just seemed like such a cool instrument—very magical looking.

M: Did he show you how it worked or explain it to you?

H: I can’t remember, but he probably said that there’s pedals and knee levers and all these kinds of gadgets. It was pedal steel that I heard first. Then a few years later I got pretty devoted to Punk and Underground music and I thought steel would be a good instrument to mess around with in that format. So, first I bought a lap steel at a pawn shop—Dickerson, pearloid model that I wish I still had—but I couldn’t get anything out of it because I didn’t know any tunings. It just sounded like Blues guitar kind of stuff.

M: I think we all kind of go through that same experience. You were a bass player at the time?

H: No, I didn’t even touch the bass until a good 10 years later, but I’d always played guitar. From age 10 I took guitar lessons—I took 5 years of Classical guitar lessons all through high school. I pretty much knew I wanted to play music, ideally, in a professional setting.

So, I couldn’t get anything out of my lap steel, and then I bought a single neck pedal steel. Still I didn’t know the tunings—it was probably an E9 guitar. I borrowed a Sneaky Pete Kleinow book from the library here that had some tunings and basic technique, but it just wasn’t working. I couldn’t figure it out, but I played it in a band on a couple of songs, just getting sound effects, like picking behind the bar. I wasn’t really interested in any hardcore Country music until a few years later.

Anyway, so I put the pedal steel in storage and moved to New York. Subsequently the steel was stolen. I ended up not doing anything in New York for about 5 years, just trying to break into the Underground scene until I answered an ad in the Village Voice for this band that needed a bass player (Helmet). I happened to have a bass, so I thought, “What the hell? Everyone played guitar—I might as well try to break in as a bassist.” I really enjoyed the bass, certainly in that context.

It was right around the middle of the Helmet career, probably early ‘90s, that I got more interested in traditional Country and Western Swing music. I’ve always had one foot in the Country door, in some sense, but I was getting into more traditional stuff like Buck Owens, George Jones, Ernest Tubb…basically as a diversion to what I was doing in Rock—you know, super-macho, tough guy, tattoos. It was kind of stupid at a certain point and what I liked about Country music was that it wasn’t so concerned with being modern or cutting edge. It just had a certain relaxed soul to it and it was good-natured.

M: Yeah, and it’s also a humble—even if it’s not completely sincere in its humility it still has that humbleness to it.

H: I agree and I certainly appreciated that coming from a super Agro world of Rock which I didn’t always identify with. It was fun playing the music, because it was very physical, kind of like sports.
I saw Junior Brown’s first gig in New York at the Lone Star and he totally blew me away.

M: I think I was at that show, too.

H: It was just phenomenal. He was the first guy I’d ever seen play lap steel and he had “that sound” which turned out to be the 6th chord. So, I pulled the lap steel from under my bed and looked in the Village Voice the next day and found this guy David Hamburger. Have you had any contact with him?

M: No, although I’d certainly heard his name and I had some friends who played in a band with him, but I heard he moved down to Austin.

H: Yeah. I started taking some lessons with him and he set me up with G6 tuning and he was also the one—at the time I was mostly interested in Honky Tonk and Western Swing—but he said, “If you really want to devote yourself to lap steel, you should check out Hawaiian music.” Like most people, I never thought of Hawaiian music at all—I thought it was all just like Don Ho. So, I just bought some CDs and at the time I was buying everything that I could that had any kind of non-pedal steel on it. I called up Scotty’s Music and got Jerry Byrd’s “Steel Guitar Hawaiian Style” and the 2 Sol Hoopii CDs, but it was the Jerry Byrd that was the life-changer for me.

M: I was kind of like you in that I probably bought 30-40 CDs and LPs a month from the age of 18 to 30—that’s all I did, was buy music. It was like I was always searching for something that I knew was out there, but I didn’t know exactly what it was. I could feel when I was getting closer and closer to it, though. I probably bought most of the same CDs as you—the Sol Hoopii, etc. I had that long before I really got interested in playing.

When I finally got interested in playing, there were almost no resources, except for the occasional book, which didn’t tell the whole story. I can tell you one thing, though—I knew right away that it was some serious shit! It became apparent in the beginning that it was serious and I don’t think I had what it took at the time to devote myself to it.

H: I would agree that it is some serious shit! For me, it was like when I first was discovering Punk and Underground: there was this whole world of great players and great tunes and great singers and it was deep. It had a lot of substance. I would also have to point out that it had a lot more steel guitar than the Country stuff. Even still to this day I want to hear Joaquin Murphey playing through the entire song—I don’t want to hear just one little break. You know, that’s what kind of the drag of that music and what’s so great about the Hawaiian music. It’s there behind the vocals, there during the solo, intros and outros.

M: There is a real art to the backing in Hawaiian music and also they’re playing in a smaller group.

H: Yeah, I would love to hear Joaquin in a smaller band. I would say that from the beginning it was the electric steel, Jerry Byrd in particular, and a year later I got more interested in the acoustic stuff. I listened to that Jerry Byrd CD over and over when I was still in Helmet, and I would take my lap steel on tour and just mess with it on the bus. I got Jerry’s book (Instruction Course For Steel Guitar) and was messing with tunings just trying to play something that sounded like music.

M: Did you get through the whole book?

H: Oh my God, no. I would say I didn’t even scratch the surface. I bought all the books that there were, but I’m not a book guy. I totally just play by ear. I don’t even know what chord I’m on or necessarily what key I’m in unless it’s written next to the song title on the set list. [laughs] I’ve always thought of it as, “Where’s my I? I is on the 3rd fret, there’s my IV and V” and I have my little boxes—my riff boxes—and I have my little gimmicks, my octaves and playing thirds and whatnot. I totally play by ear and at this point it’s a huge drawback. I wish I could go back and start over from scratch by learning scales and sharps and flats….

M: Do you know any of this with regards to the guitar?

H: No, I don’t at all. I mean I had theory back in high school when I was studying Classical guitar but Classical guitar is very impractical to playing Pop music. You don’t learn how to read chord charts—it was kind of a mistake. I wish I was more interested in Jazz at the time—it would have been much more practical, even in the Rock world.

M: I have to say, I’ve enjoyed your playing on the Moonlighters recordings and I would say they inspired me. When I bought my Tricone, I said to my wife, “OK, honey, I promise I’m going to go out and find a gig” and it just so happens that I found the only gig in existence. So I want to thank you for that. [laughs]

H: No problem and thanks for saying that. It was a lot of fun working on that stuff. Bliss turned me on to more of the Jazz side of things and I was probably the Hawaiian side of things.

M: Let’s face it, how many other bands were out there playing that kind of music?

H: Well, there a band called the Do Hos…they kind of disappeared. But, yeah, there really weren’t any people doing that and that was kind of fortunate for us–certainly fortunate for me. [laughs]

M: A good thing about the band was that there was original music. I’ve always felt that Bliss is an excellent lyricist.

H: Oh, yeah, she’s a great lyric writer.

M: I always thought the band had a solid foundation in the traditional sounds and, yet, it was always reaching forward….

H: Maybe some of our other influences sometimes can’t help but come out. Bliss really was the one into doing original music and it was a good thing for the band and probably opened some doors that we probably wouldn’t have had if we were just aping the old shit, which I probably would have been fine with also.

M: You were involved with some other projects while you were in New York, too….

H: Oh yeah, when the Moonlighters started I was also playing with Howard Fishman. We started playing in the subways in Brooklyn. And I was playing weekly with Greg Garing and his Alphabet City Opry. That was actually the first situation where I was playing steel guitar—slightly pre-Moonlighters. That was a weekly gig for about a year. I quit to rehearse and work on tunes, instead of just playing tunes that I’d never heard before. It was fun playing with Greg, but he would just say, “This is in C, follow me.”

M: I have to admit, that’s what I live for. You did some stuff with Wade Schuman and Hazmat Modine, too….

H: I did some gigs with them and recorded some songs on their first CD.

Who Walks In When I Walk Out – Hazmat Modine

At this time I was planning on moving to Hawaii…I was hoping to get some lessons with Jerry Byrd. That was sort of my dream at the time but once I got to Portland I had read that Jerry was sick and had stopped playing and I ended up getting some gigs with The Yes Yes Boys in Seattle and I would take the train up to Seattle a few times a month for about 3 or 4 months. Del Rey is truly amazing–a great player. I think a few months later Jerry died. He was most of the reason I was headed to Hawaii—even though I probably wouldn’t have hooked with him, I could have taken some lessons with Alan Akaka or John Ely. I didn’t really have any work skills once I left New York and the thought of working at Hertz Rental Car for minimum wage, trying to afford a studio apartment in Honolulu….

Go to Part 2

Posted in Conversation with...., Fresh baked thoughts | Tagged hazmat modine, helmet, henry bogdan, jerry byrd, moonlighters, sol hoopii | Leave a comment

Intervallically Speaking: Fun with “Tenths”

Posted on July 25, 2011 by Mike Neer

One of the most common devices of Blues and Stride and even Jazz piano players is the use of tenths in the left hand. What do I mean by “tenths”? Well, it is the interval of a tenth from the bottom note to the the top note. In other words, it is an octave plus a third. The beauty of the tenth is that with these 2 notes we are able to create a sense of movement in the bass and in the melody region, giving us a nice taste of voice leading. Another example of tenths that you might be a little more familiar with is the guitar part in “Blackbird” by the Beatles. The moving bass note and the tenth above it really give it that wide open, wonderful movement.

The tenth interval, which can either be defined as a minor tenth or major tenth, can really help us in implying harmony. For example, if I play the notes A and C a minor tenth apart (string 7 (A) and string 2 (C)), these 2 notes imply many chords–Amin (root and min 3rd), FMaj (3rd and 5th), D7 (5th and b7th), F#m7b5 (min 3rd and b5), and others. We can really cover a lot of ground with these and we’ll never run out of these 2 note voicings–in fact, we can easily connect them in different inversions.

Below, I’ve devised a very simple exercise which harmonizes the C Major and A Natural Minor scale in tenths. First, you will play the scale on strings 7 and 2, using forward slants. A good tip to remember is that if the strings are a minor 3rd or minor tenth apart, we will use forward slants. For strings that are a major 3rd or tenth apart, we use reverse slants.

After the scale completes at the octave on fret 12, we play the same exercise using strings 6 and 1. Pay careful attention to the positions, as there is a good amount of reverse slanting. It is important to memorize these patterns and learn to play them in each and every key. If you are not really that comfortable with keys yet, just think of moving the pattern up to the necessary fret to match the key–for example, for C#, we simply move the exercises up 1 fret. For G, we move everything up to the 7th fret, etc. In this case, we also want to cover the ground below the 7th fret, so we would then look at how the patterns plays from the end to the beginning.

The final part of this exercise is to use both pairs of strings (which give us a minor tenth and major tenth) and combine them to play it without slanting.

It is extremely important to be very aware of your right hand while doing this exercise. After we sound each chord for its duration, we want to block with the side of the palm before sliding to the next postion. This takes a good amount of practice, but you should get to the point where you hear nothing in between chords–at least that is the goal. Also, pay careful attention to the right hand picking designations.

Have fun with this. I hope to take it a bit deeper next time around.

Continue to Part 2

Posted in Lessons and Tips | Tagged intervals, stride piano, tenths | 1 Comment

New book in the works and other news….

Posted on July 20, 2011 by Mike Neer

I’ve begun working on a new book called Concepts For Improvisation that I am really excited about. It is geared toward the steel guitarist, although it will be broad in scope and not focused on any specific tuning. It will be written for both the pedal and non-pedal player. I’m really excited about this one, but it’s going to take long while to complete. I’m hoping to have it ready for December.

******************************************************************************
I have a lot of great interviews lined up and, while the end result may only take up a few pages of written text, it is a time-consuming process. Once the actual conversation takes place, I have the task of transcribing and editing the conversation. That process is really enjoyable for me and, based on the overwhelmingly positive responses I’ve received, it is for you, too.

******************************************************************************

With the arrival of summer and a very busy schedule, I’d basically decided to take a little time off from focusing so much on playing my instruments, and just begin absorbing a lot of the things that I’ve learned over the past year or so. Sometimes I need that kind of separation to help me digest and refocus my energies toward a specific goal. For anyone who has been a regular gigging musician, you might agree that it can be difficult to have a clear head when there is a lot of music swirling around in there. Don’t get me wrong–it is a blessing to be able to have a busy schedule. But if you are trying to look beyond what you are doing musically and artistically, it can be a little difficult. Having a busy work, family and music schedule will definitely help you become more aware of time management and the value of focus.

For a short time, I stopped doing transcriptions and basically stopped listening to steel guitar music. Why? As a player who was not brought up in the tradition of steel guitar music and living in a scene where those traditions don’t necessarily result in an abundance of gigs, I wanted to get back to who I was as a musician before I played the steel and then make my steel playing a part of that. Sounds a little contrived, right? Well, not necessarily in my case. I had acquired a lot of the necessary tools to pull it off, and the musical foundation is already there. The most difficult part now is convincing other musicians that I can hang with them.

A lot of this has involved exploring other textures. While I love the sound of B-3s and electric piano and synthesizers, etc., I can’t bring myself to abandon the sound of the steel guitar. I love using effects, such as filters, ring modulators, etc., but the basic signal for me will always remain the steel. I really debated purchasing one of the Electro-Harmonix POG2 units that do such a great job of making the guitar sound like an organ, but for me it is too radical a change of the steel sound. I still prefer the sound of the steel through a rotary speaker of some sort for that kind of sound. As far as synths go, while I love filter effects and use them quite a bit, to actually convert my steel sound to a synth waveform is not something I desire to do. Maybe that is a sign that I am traditionalist in some respects, but personally I would rather the compositions and playing excite people more than the sounds. Of course, that is only my personal view as pertains to my own playing; I don’t expect everyone to feel the same and I would welcome the opportunity to hear what others are doing with it.

So, now that I’ve had the time to re-evaluate and refresh, I have begun doing more transcriptions for some Steelin’ From The Masters lessons. I’ve had a lot of requests, so I am trying to get those done. Also, I’ve begun taking gigs again, being careful to keep my own explorations off the bandstand (unless, of course, I am encouraged to let it all hang out). I really love playing within the framework of tradition and I’m always working on getting better at it. It isn’t easy to restrain yourself from taking a left turn and letting things slip in that probably shouldn’t be there, but it is definitely a great experience. Having a good understanding of music and the essence of styles is probably what I’d consider to be one of the most valuable traits to have.

Thanks for indulging me. As always, feel free to contact me or post your thoughts here.

Posted in Fresh baked thoughts | 1 Comment

Talking Steel Guitar with Joel Paterson, Part 2

Posted on July 14, 2011 by Mike Neer

M: Your record has a really good balance of hot rod steel tunes and pretty tunes mixed with just some great swampy, greasy things. It’s just super. Your Panhandle Rag really invokes Jimmy Day for me. And Boppin’ Steel Guitar has a really swampy, Sacred Steel feel to it.

J: I wanted to try and play a bluesy open string finger picking thing like I’d play on guitar. You can play a lot of open string bluesy things on C6, mixed with a little Travis-picking.

Listen to a clip: Boppin’ Steel Guitar by Joel Paterson

M: What is your thought process when you’re improvising?

J: It’s always related to the guitar–I feel like I’m always searching for some lick that I play on guitar, “Let’s see if I can pull this off on the steel….” [laughs]. I think just like I do when I play guitar…when I think about music theory when I’m improvising, I think about intervals a lot. I always want to know where the 3rd is, #5, b7…I know the sounds I want and I try to find them.

M: Are you a studied guitar player?

J: No, not really, but I’ve learned a lot of music theory over the years just from playing forever. I don’t sit down and read music very well–it takes me forever, I never had any experience with that. I know theory-wise what I’m doing, I think that’s very important, especially if you play any kind of jazz. I think all guitar players knew that stuff back then. Guitar players that people say, “Oh, he didn’t know what he was doing, he just played by ear…”–I think that’s BS. I think people like Django knew exactly what he was doing when he played a diminished scale for an altered chord…Wes Montgomery, too. Those guys knew exactly what they were doing.

M: Oh, for sure….

J: That’s how I think about it–if you’re trying to play single notes, picture the chord underneath and just find some good little moves and get around on it.

Another thing about C6 is that Buddy Emmons set this impossible standard for everybody to just play insane Bebop licks on C6 and it used to bum me out until I just realized that I love Jerry Byrd and it’s OK to just go at your own pace. Steel’s supposed to be expressive anyway, you don’t need to be a hot rod on the steel…pedal steel speed picking doesn’t really impress anybody except steel guitar players.

M: Do you have any interesting harmonic approaches to things, like when you’re playing a chord solo?

J: Well, it’s hard to explain in a nutshell–I’m pretty much following basic rules of swing harmony, stuff that’s rooted in Charlie Christian. I don’t think you need to know every scale in the world, but it’s good to know some Jazz harmony if you want to play Western Swing, you need to know how to move chords around. Nothing I’m doing is anything different than a Jazz clarinet player in 1930, just a different instrument. The key for me is to just simplify things.

M: One of the things I believe is that you can’t be timid on the instrument. I have a difficult time sometimes playing in front of convention crowds. I’ve only experienced that a few times in my life and it was only when I played these conventions–my right hand froze….

J: I did it once at the Guitar Geek convention and I was terrified. It proves that when you play steel guitar you have to be relaxed and not play too hard–play really light and not have big movements–micro-movements with your picking and the way you mute the strings and everything. You have to play easy.

M: You have to be relaxed and comfortable and yet you have to approach the instrument with a kind of confidence; otherwise you can end up sounding timid and it can mess with your sound, your vibrato….

J: Vibrato’s great with steel because there’s an infinite amount of speeds you can have. I don’t think you should find one speed and stick to that. I think you try to do them all–a nice slow Jerry Byrd vibrato, maybe even a crazy Speedy West vibrato.

M: I agree with that–it’s something you have to do consciously, you have to have control over it.

J: You have to practice it and then you have to think about it and later on when you play gigs you can’t think about everything because with steel there’s too much to think about. But it is a technical instrument and you have to be obsessively technical about everything to sound good.

La Cumparsita by Joel Paterson

M: I really like the way you use the volume pedal–you use it for dynamics and expression. You hear a lot of steel players talk about how they use it to increase sustain, but I never got that.

J: I don’t ever think of it like that for sustain. It’s not like the steel guitar doesn’t have enough sustain–it has more than the guitar does. I think of it more as a way to express myself. Also, when I play E9 and back up a singer I’ve got to be able to back off the volume–you also get this nice, real clean trebly sound and you can bring it in for effect.

When I play C6, I’m like a frustrated organ player. I don’t play keyboards at all, but I always thought in another life I’d love to be a B-3 player. So when I play C6 I’m always fantasizing that I’m Jimmy Smith on the pedal steel [laughs]. The pedal comes in handy for that.

M: I like the way organ players go from a whisper to a scream.

J: I think with steel when you start every note up full blast, especially with chimes, can be real staccato and piercing, so a volume pedal is essential. I don’t always use a volume pedal with lap steel–sometimes I’ll just curl my pinky around the volume knob.

M: You use a lot of techniques with your right hand that sort of set you apart a bit–tremolos and things like that–almost hearken back to Jerry Byrd. It really brings out the artistry in your playing.

J: There’s so many things you can do with the picking–the 3 finger banjo rolls which I probably do subconsciously, the thumb pick strums get that big fat sound–it’s kind of endless. Luckily, I had a teacher who really got me started to have my hand angled at the right way and to always be muting the strings with the side my hand. You never lift your hand far off the strings at all, they’re always about a millimeter away from the strings, so they’re always ready to mute stuff that you don’t want to ring out. And to also play single notes with mainly your thumb and second finger which, as a guitar player, you’d never think of doing that. It’s kind of unnatural at first.

M: It’s been great talking with you, Joel, and I think you put a lot of great information out there. I like to get this stuff out there for newer players to let them know that, even though they may want to try to do it their own way, there are some legit ways of doing things that they can learn and it can save them a lot of time and effort. I want to hear people playing great steel guitar music for a long time.

J: Yeah, me too! Well, that’s cool. I hope people can learn something. Obviously, I’m a traditionalist and I love the old school players, but I try to keep it fresh–I don’t want to sound like I’m just imitating those guys. That’s my goal with my band Modern Sounds: take something old, play it with taste and tradition, but try to make it fresh.

Joel plays steel guitar on Joel Paterson – Steel Is Real (Ventrella Records)

Posted in Conversation with.... | 3 Comments

Talking Steel Guitar with Joel Paterson, Part 1

Posted on July 12, 2011 by Mike Neer

Joel Paterson and his Emmons

Joel Paterson is a helluva musician. He is widely recognized as a guitarist in the Rockabilly, Jazz, and Blues styles from his associations with Chicago groups like Devil In A Woodpile, Jimmy Sutton’s Four Charms, Kelly Hogan’s Wooden Leg, and his own Modern Sounds trio, as well as touring and recording with artists like Dave ‘Honey Boy’ Edwards, Wanda Jackson, and Carl ‘Sonny’ Leyland. But Joel also plays steel guitar. And he plays it really well. How did a young guitarist from Madison, WI migrate to Chicago, become one of the Windy City’s most respected guitarists, and then take on an instrument like the steel guitar? Joel shed some light on how he was able to learn how to play steel guitar despite his guitarist proclivities and he offered up some great advice on how to do the same. For what it’s worth, it’s some damn good advice….

Mike: Joel, I really like your Steel Is Real CD a lot–it really showcases your playing in a wide variety of styles and I guess that’s a testament to who you are as a musician…

Joel: Well, thanks. Part of that is because there’s not really a Country scene here in Chicago anymore —I think there used to be back in the day. I used to take pedal steel lessons from this guy named Ken Champion, who’s a great teacher, and he said back in the day you could work almost every night playing in the Country bars in the ‘70s and ‘80s, but that’s totally died out. When I started playing steel, I’d been a guitar player for years and I had my own bands, so when I started playing steel I wasn’t really influenced by a scene or a certain style. I just kind of used it to do everything I liked.

We tried to come up with some different things on that record so people would like it—not just steel guitar players. There are a lot of great steel guitar records that I love, like Curly Chalker’s “Big Hits On Big Steel”—I think it’s the greatest record ever, but you play that for the average person and they can’t stand it. We tried to make something that somebody who doesn’t know anything about steel could just put it on and enjoy it.

M: Well, the record you mentioned, as well as some of the other great steel records we could cite were recorded 40-50 years ago….

J: That’s a sound I love, but I guess a lot of people don’t….

M: When someone asks, “What are the greatest steel guitar records, you’re always going to go back to Jimmy Day, Lloyd Green….

J: Golden Steel Guitar Hits, that’s one of my favorites—yeah, Big Steel Guitar and Hit Sounds– the one with the Little Darlin’ instrumentals. I guess there hasn’t really been that much because there’s never really been a budget for steel guitar music and, especially these days, there’s zero budget. So, in that way, when I did my steel guitar record, it’s homemade, so you can call all the shots and do whatever you want.

M: What was it that made you want to play steel guitar in the first place?

J: Well, it’s kind of funny—like I said, I’ve been playing guitar since I was about 14 or so back in the ‘80s and I started off just obsessed with ‘20s and ‘30s Country Blues, Ragtime finger picking guitar and later on ‘50s Chicago Blues and that stuff, and that’s all I played. Then I slowly developed this interest in jazz through Charlie Christian, guys like that. It took me years to be a passable Jazz guitarist. It was just one of things where I’d wandered into a music store in Wisconsin and they had one of those cheap Sho-Bud/Fender beginner models from the ‘70s. I didn’t know anything about it—I just bought it for $500 from this guy and it was like, “Cool, I have a pedal steel!” I had no idea how it works and I wasn’t even into Country. I was a professional guitar player at this point, but I was totally lost on this thing.

Luckily, somebody told me about Ken Champion and I took lessons right away and I’m glad I did. I pretty much went right for lessons because I had no idea how to even set the thing up.

M: That was a pretty smart move—you probably could have done yourself more harm than good, which is what happened to someone like me….

J: That’s what I’d recommend for any steel player really. I was lucky that it was Ken Champion, who isn’t a guy who says, “Just play this…” and teaches you a bunch of hot licks that you can’t digest. He’s a very methodical teacher who started from square one and he wrote out great exercises.

So, I immediately got into Country and the first thing I liked was those Buck Owens records and Tom Brumley was probably my first steel hero. He was a little more accessible than trying to learn Buddy Emmons right away.

Another reason I’d recommend lessons right away is that, as a guitar player he told me how to mute the strings, how to angle the finger picks and how to hold the bar and this stuff that’s very unnatural for a guitar player. At first, you’re fighting every instinct. Almost everything you do right on the guitar is wrong on the steel.

M: You said you came from a Country Blues background, so you had your finger picking together….

J: Back in the day, all I wanted to be was Blind Blake and Blind Boy Fuller. I joined a Rockabilly and they were like, “Oh, you’re a great Rockabilly player,” I guess because it sounded like Scotty Moore and Chet Atkins. I already knew how to finger pick and knew how to do alternate thumb picking—I guess that is a benefit for playing steel that you move your 3 fingers with some independence.

Listen: Walkin’ Ten Strings – Joel Paterson

M: That was one thing that I can hear you manage to bring over from the guitar—you’ve got the Travis-picking goin’ on.

J: Yeah, I heard Buddy Emmons do that on Rose City Chimes and was like, “What is that?” You have to have C6 and you kind of have to have a pedal steel with Emmons set up to do that stuff. I’m not so good at sitting there and transcribing his stuff—it would have taken me all day—so I just kind of fumbled around and took the stuff that I do on guitar and found it on the steel. It’s cool to Travis pick on C6.

M: One of things that was really difficult for me was that I was constantly trying to connect the dots between the the two instruments (guitar and steel) to get it to make some sense—I didn’t have a teacher and there was no one to turn to, because I didn’t know anyone who played steel. It took me a while before I realized that I needed to look at things in a different way. I was always trying to conjure up some special tuning that would make it easier, and I went through a ton of them, but ultimately I just felt that was a waste of time.

J: Well, I wouldn’t say that anything is a waste of time, but I know what you mean. It’s frustrating even when you do have a teacher because you want to jump ahead. I was already playing gigs and I made my living as a musician and I wanted to be able to gig with this thing right away. And technically, you’ve got to get a handle on your equipment—it’s not like you can just go down to the pedal steel store and get the perfect pedal steel.

I pretty much knew I was into Western Swing, so I knew I needed C6, so I pretty much went looking for a doubleneck—I went through a few. I’ve got a 1970 black Emmons now and I’m pretty much set for life. Aside from the technique there’s all this technical stuff. I’m not one of these tinkerers who can get under the hood and mess with the pedals. I was lucky to have a genius repair guy here in town named Dave Peterson set up my steels so I could jump right in. The other thing was pretty much right away I tried to force myself to play gigs, even though I was almost a beginner.

M: There’s nothing like being on the hot seat….

J: Steel is the kind of instrument you practice at home and come up with little arrangements at home and it all goes out the window on a gig.

M: I’ve watched a few of your YouTube videos and I’m really impressed with the way you’ve been able to compartmentalize both instruments and achieve that kind of level on both. You use a great amount of dynamics and expression in your playing.

J: Oh, thank you.

M: Did you start playing lap steel a little later on?

J: No, pretty much right away. I bought my single neck about the same time I got a lap steel. I started learning C6 on the lap steel before I got a hold of a doubleneck pedal, because I knew I wanted to play that. I think it helped, too, to learn the C6 map and some of the little chords. C6 is not like E9—when you play single note solos, you don’t have to use the pedals and you can play a lot of stuff.

M: What were you doing to learn C6?

J: Well, a lot of it was me learning to play by ear and fumbling around trying to learn licks I already knew on guitar like the back of my hand. I wanted to learn some single note, swingy stuff on C6, so I started fooling around with that. I listened to a lot of Jerry Byrd and Jimmy Day. Jerry Byrd, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” that’s a good place to start. That Jimmy Day record, Golden Steel Guitar Hits—I love that record for C6. You can play a lot of that stuff on lap, aside from some of the chord solos. A lot of the single note stuff and melodies are kind of old-fashioned Western Swing.

M: He was really slick. Some of the stuff he pulled out of the air, some of his chordal work—he was really greasy, a really funky cat.

J: I’m glad that record got me, that’s one of my 2 favorite records. It’s just a bible of licks. Steel And Strings(Jimmy Day) is a great record for learning E9 melodies. I’ve kind of mellowed out over the years–I just want to play nice melodies, nice chord stuff, single note stuff here and there–definitely more like Jimmy Day than Buddy Emmons. I’m never going to be a bebopper on the steel, though I love that stuff….

M: I get really inspired listening to Curly Chalker and he how brought the whole piano block chord thing to his steel playing. It just makes me want to hunt all those chords down on the lap steel.

J: The trick with the lap steel is having a good band–you can play 2 and 3 note version of chords, sort of hint at chords. You don’t need to contort yourself to play some gigantic chords.

You can tell that Buddy Emmons and Jimmy Day had a background in playing non-pedal Western Swing, Jerry Byrd stuff. I think that directly influenced how they set up the C6 neck.

M: Did you have anyone who introduced you to music like Western Swing in depth?

J: No, not really. I learned a lot of stuff on the Steel Guitar Forum. I kind of take it for granted. I used to go on there a lot and that was a great education, hearing people talk about certain guys and thinking, “Oh, I gotta check that guy out.” I tried to piece together a collection–I mean, I was stuck in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, I still kind of am. It all kept coming back to the same people: Buddy Emmons, Jimmy Day, Lloyd Green, Jerry Byrd.

M: The forum has been pretty invaluable for me. It was the first time I was able to get any kind of information.

Joel Paterson and friends

What kind of lap steel do you play?

J: The only one I could never bear to sell is a 1936 Gibson EH-150, 7 string. I’ve had a few Fenders but I never could get comfortable with them. I got really attached to the 7 string tuning for C6 and also the wide spacing. I use C6 with a high G (G E C A G E C). I wanted to learn that Jimmy Day record Golden Steel Hits and all those Western Swing melodies–it’s nice to have that high G on there.

What I like about the 7 string tuning is you have the high G and then you have the root on the bottom. It’s a nice symmetrical thing. I could never figure out what to do with C6 on a 6 string….

M: I think at that point is where tunings like C6/A7 come in handy.

J: Is that with an E on top?

M: Yes, and then there’s always just C6….

J: If I had a 6 string with a high G on top, then my 6th string would be a third (E)–it’s nice to have a root on the bottom. I like having 7 strings better than 8. I didn’t feel like I needed that extra string on there.

M: On your Steel Is Real recording there’s a lot of dynamics and a lot of it has to do with your right hand, but you’ve got a really in-your-face sound on the recording. What kind of amp did you use?

J: Well, that was a Twin Reverb on that for that pedal steel and Princeton Reverb for the lap steel. We recorded that record all in the same room together, in a little circle, with tons of bleed. That’s why it sounds like an old recording. I didn’t want to sound like we were in different rooms playing with headphones on. The steel, bass and drums were all recorded live and I went back later and added some guitar to compliment it. We tried to keep the volume down, my amp was 2 1/2, maybe 3 and the bass was played acoustically.

M: Are you particular about speakers?

J: Not really, I just need something that I can lift and won’t blow. My problem for years was trying to find an amp that works for steel and guitar, because sometimes I’m switching back and forth every other song. It’s a good thing to do–it kind of gets you out of your comfort zone so you’ll have to adjust on the fly.

M: Once in a while you get lucky enough and find a magic amp that sounds good at any volume. I had a Twin Reverb like that with JBL K120s.

J: It can be like a wild goose chase.

Go to Part 2

Posted in Conversation with.... | Tagged Curly Chalker, emmons, jerry byrd, jimmy day, joel paterson, ken champion, lap steel | Leave a comment

Conversation with Lee Jeffriess, Part 4

Posted on July 9, 2011 by Mike Neer

M: I had once heard a story about how your Bigsby was stolen. Can you tell me about it?

L: What happened was we went to a Western Swing meeting up in Sacramento at the Sky Lanes, which was a bowling alley. We saw a great show and our gear got ripped off that afternoon in the van out in the parking lot, broad daylight—it was a funky neighborhood, a lot of tweakers and crazy people hanging out. We went and literally bought instruments in San Francisco because we were playing a big show the next night and I got a Gibson Consolette D-8, you know the korina wood one, actually a nice guitar. By the time we got back everyone knew that we had our stuff ripped off and this was before the internet and I was good friends with Roseanne Lindley, Dave’s daughter, but I didn’t know who Dave Lindley was and she didn’t really make a big deal about her dad. So, she came to a show at the Doll Hut in Anaheim and she was like, “Hey, my dad heard about you getting your guitar ripped off—he wants to give you a guitar.” I said, “Really, what does he want to give me?” and she said he had this Rickenbacher triple neck he wanted to give me. She said, “I don’t think he should give it to you, though, I think you should pay for it.” I said, “Well, yeah, of course I’ll pay for it.” So we get over there—Big Sandy drove me over and he said “You know her dad’s Dave Lindley?” I’m like, “No.” “You never heard of Dave Lindley? He’s a famous guy, man, plays weird slide guitar, stuff like that.”

So, we go over there and there’s Dave Lindley and he goes, “Hey, sorry to hear about your guitar. That sucks. You lost a Bigsby, that’s horrible!” He was genuinely bummed out. He was a really cool dude. we hung out over there and he pulled out all these crazy instruments, there was just amps and junk everywhere—it was like a pawn shop/music store/house—he said, “This is nothing, I’ve got a 3 car garage full of crap.” And he said, “I bought this guitar at a church in San Bernadino in 1971 and they had their own recording studio and were fully equipped with Rickenbacker equipment. Basses, guitars, steels, amps—everything.” He said, “I paid $100 for this guitar in 1971 and to be honest with you I wanted to give this to you, but Roseanne seems to think you have to pay for it.” “OK, I’m willing to pay for it.” “I’ll tell you what—I want $100 for it—I want my $100 back.”

M: Was it one of those big old wooden rectangular jobs? I had one of those, too….

L: Yep, the “trailer park model”–the 507. It sure sounded good. He actually gave me a good tip and told me to take the bottom off and fill it with foam. He said, “Back in the day, they didn’t get that loud, and it wasn’t an issue, but if you’re playing louder than they played in the ’50s take the bottom off and fill it with foam and that’ll cancel any of that feedback stuff—you’ll be able to play as loud as you want.” He was right.

He was like, “When I was 12 years old we’d sneak into KXLA and we’d look into the studio and watch Speedy and Jimmy playing radio shows.” And he was totally hip to Murphey and all that stuff, too. He was like, “Oh, man, Joaquin–me and Freddie Roulette used to sit around and listen to that stuff.” Freddie loved Joaquin.

M: And it was happening right in his backyard….

L: Yeah, he was just into music, way more open than I’d ever be. He was just super open and just a generally nice person with a good karma about him.

It was funny about 2 or 3 years later, my wife woke me up and I had a had a raging hangover, and she said, “Just get the phone, I’m sick of this guy calling.” So, I answer the phone like “Yeah?” And he goes “This is Ry Cooder, I want to ask you a few questions.” I was like, this is Alan getting back with a crank call, he’s got someone from Rhino to crank call me. “Did Alan put you up to this?” He said, “No, this is Ry Cooder, I got your number from Roseanne Lindley.” He wanted to just ask me about Bigsby steels, he was thinking of buying one from Paul Warnik, a PA reissue—he said, “I can’t stop listening to Vance Terry, I want to do that.” [laughs]

M: What kind of rig are you using these days?

L: My latest steel guitar rig that I’ve been using for almost a year now is an amp that was built by a guy named Skip Simmons. Skip lives out in Dixon, CA, south of Sacramento, and Skip is a guy who takes old 40s and 50s tube PA heads and converts them into really nice sounding guitar or harp amplifiers. I asked him if he ever made anything for steel guitar, because I knew he had this clout with a lot of the Blues community: Rick Holmstrom, Little Charlie, Charlie Musselwhite, Kim Wilson—pretty heavy hitters in that scene. But he was a steel guitar nut, which was cool—he was into Bob Dunn, Leon McAuliffe and early electric players. And I was saying, “Can you build a steel guitar amp? I want it to sound like this, this and this.” And he made me an amp and it was pretty good. It didn’t have the headroom I needed. I said, “I’ve only got this one sound, Skip, I need more variety than this. I like what it does in the top end but I want the bass to be louder and snappier. I want this to sound like a 25L15 and whatever Boggs was using. When I crash the bar, I want it to snap, like on an old Noel Boggs record.”

So, we went back and forth and eventually he built me something. We dialed it in! And he started making other stuff and he said, “Try this for me” and I’d try stuff out, road test it. I’d start giving him more and more steel music to listen to and I sort of gave him more and more information so he could listen to what I was asking, and he got it. And now Skip is making a damn good steel amp—basically taking a 50 year old PA head that’s built like a Sherman tank, with even more iron on it, which equates more headroom, fatter bass—just better, more musical. These things are like overbuilt and are of no use to anyone because no one is going to use them as a PA, but what they do make is damn good 25 or 8 watt or whatever wattage you want guitar or steel amp. This amp is gonna last longer than you—totally indestructible and really sweet.

I think there’s a ton of guys playing Hawaiian or Western Swing that would love to have one of his amps. If they owned one, they’d go, “Oh, shit, there it is!”—Fender and Gibson sounds. Skip basically will put you an amp together for $600.

M: What are you using for a speaker?

L: I use a 12 inch Altec, a 417-C. I would use a 418-B but I’m trying to downsize. My guitar is like a Rolls Royce. [laughs] I swear to God, the 418-B is probably the best steel guitar speaker ever made and the 417 is right behind it.

M: Tell me about this record with John Munnerlyn….

John Munnerlyn & Lee Jeffriess: Guitars in Perspective

L: It really wasn’t my project—he was just like, “come play on my tunes and could you write a couple of things?” I was kind of busy touring with Big Sandy, but I came up with “Blues For Earl.” And there were a few others. I wanted to come up with something in that Joaquin tuning. I never got too deep into that tuning, but I should try it again now because I think I’ve got better ears.

The funny about it is, it was done in 2 pieces the second recorded sessions was a different rhythm section and we went in the studio and played him the original stuff and said, “We want this to sound as if it was all done at once” and that was hard to do, with different guys as well. When all is said and done, people like the record. I think John did a really good job and wrote some really nice tunes.

The West Coast Ramblers – Rosetta

M: The West Coast Ramblers—did you put this project together?

L: Yeah, more or less—the project was started by a guitar player called Nick Rossi, a great Hammond B-3 player and he plays Jazz guitar, has a really cool ’50s Jazz trio that plays kind of Sal Salvador, Chuck Wayne, NY stuff. And he went to the singer and said, “Let’s get Lee to play steel and put a Western Swing band together” and as soon as we put it together, he said, “I can’t do it, I’ve got too many irons in the fire.” So we found the present guitar player…he came over and blew our minds.

M: Are you thinking about doing any recordings?

L: Yes. Very soon—we’re actually working on something right now. We’re putting out a 45.

M: I’m sure I can speak for everyone when I say I’m looking forward to hearing it.

L: I’ll tell you what: there’s a lot of hope—there’s some young guys out there in their mid to late 20s. One guy that comes to mind is a steel player in San Francisco, he’s been playing probably 3 or 4 years. His name is Mikiya Matsuda. He’s coming on really strong and playing cool stuff, listening to all the same guys we like and he’s talking to me about music. He’s into Bach, and odd experimental Jazz, and stuff like that and he got into the steel through Hawaiian music and being in Hawaii and hanging out with these Hawaiians. They actually turned him on to Western Swing guys—Bobby Ingano said, “I like Noel Boggs and Joaquin, you should listen to those guys.” [laughs]

M: Lee, I just want to thank you again for all the stuff you’ve done for me, Lee, and I consider you a real friend.

L: Well, you’re welcome.

Lee Jeffriess Selected Discography – Big Sandy & his Fly-Rite Boys – Jumping From 6 To 6 (1994, HighTone Records); Big Sandy & his Fly-Rite Boys – Swingin’ West (1995, HighTone records); Big Sandy & his Fly-Rite Boys – Feelin’ Kinda Lucky (1997, HighTone records); Big Sandy Presents The Fly-Rite Boys (1998, HighTone Records); Big Sandy & his Fly-Rite Boys – Night Tide (2000, HighTone Records); John Munnerlyn & Lee Jeffriess – Guitars In Perspective (2009)

Posted in Conversation with.... | Tagged bigsby, david lindley, lee jeffriess, skip simmons | 4 Comments

Conversation with Lee Jeffriess, Part 3

Posted on July 8, 2011 by Mike Neer

M: How did you end up in California?

L: I went to Austin to play a gig and we do a show with Big Sandy and his Fly-Rite Boys and I’d already met him in the UK and I did tell him I played steel (I totally lied through my teeth), and they were like, “Come on, come back to LA with us, join the band.” I just jumped ship. I’d just bought the Bigsby steel, literally the day before I stopped off in Houston. It belonged to a guy called Dusty Stewart, who had played with Hank Thompson. They saw the Bigsby and were like, “You bought that? You’ve got to come back with us.” They didn’t know if I could play or not—everyone was just young and enthusiastic. They probably thought, “He’ll get it together” and that’s when the pressure came on, when I went into overdrive. I remember Palomino Club and places like that doing these big shows and I was pretty green.

M: California is where a lot of the history of the instrument was and you must’ve been like a kid….

L: I was obsessed with it. Let’s say you were into musicals and you’re a young actor or dancer—where you gonna go? You’re gonna go straight to New York or the West End of London and live your dream. Well, I went to my West End [laughs].

By this point I wasn’t just into to Western Swing; I was into Bop, good R&B—it was all in LA. LA was the ultimate melting pot. You’d have guys like Stuff Smith playing a bar gig in El Monte and playing with Speedy and Jimmy, and then you’d have Jimmy going to Central Ave. to play with the black guys, and it reflects in his playing—it was just hipper.

M: Were you ever interested in learning to play Bop?

L: No, because I was just so narrow-minded about the steel—Speedy, Joaquin, Noel Boggs, Vance Terry, early Chalker. Even though I was open to listening to a lot of stuff, when it came down to actually physically playing I was narrowed down to LA, 1947 to ’53—that’s what I wanted to play like.

M: Speedy and Capitol Records was right in that timeframe….

L: Absolutely, Speedy was right at the core of it for me. He really was the guy that made me go, “I want to buy a steel guitar and learn.” I remember I was at Ashley’s (Kingman) place in Southampton one night and we’d stay up ‘til 6 in the morning listening to music, and he said “I’ve got to turn you onto this, there’s some mad steel and guitar playing” and he showed me the jacket and it was “Two Guitars Country Style”. He put it on and it just ripped my brain out! Still to this day, it excites me just as much as it did then. Jimmy excited me just as much as Speedy—Speedy for his energy, Jimmy for hip.

M: Speedy’s playing, man, still is the highest standard for me. Speedy couldn’t do what some of the other players could do, and he couldn’t keep up with Jimmy on his level, but he had the energy….

L: He wasn’t with Jimmy harmonically—Jimmy’s ears were way bigger—but Speedy just came up with this stuff that’s exciting, like a shot of B12. I had heard him before—someone had played me a version of Frankie Laine “Ace In the Hole” and it sounds like a whirlwind blowing up a canyon. I like the fact that he’s breaking rules, he and Jimmy.

M: You can hear the influence that Speedy had on other players, like when I heard Vance playing Skiddle-dee-Boo….

L: You know, Mike, I don’t want to contradict you, but I remember thinking the same thing—Vance was always a very classy, civil, polite guy. Even in the end he had a diplomatic air about him. He basically…I don’t think he dug Speedy [laughs]. He didn’t want to say bad things, but you tell could tell it wasn’t there for him. I don’t think he took him that seriously. I think they both had a similar excitement in their playing, but I don’t think it had come from Speedy. Vance had it, too, you know.

Vance had a way of starting up solos that’s pretty damn exciting, and he has cool pauses that set up tension like Speedy, too. He just goes harmonically somewhere else with it, his harmony’s hipper. But I’ll tell you what–a big guy for him was Boggs. He wasn’t even that enthusiastic about Joaquin, to be honest, and I asked him numerous times. I’d say, “What about those Plainsmen things?” and he’d say, “Joaquin was really good wasn’t he?” It always came back to Boggs. It was like, “Noel’s chords, man, the drive….” That was it for him.

Comments from Lee: Here is the Billy Jack Wills band moonlighting with Paul Westmoreland, Tiny is playing twin fiddles with Cotton and I believe Rusty Draper is playing take off guitar, Vance is on fire on this one some of his best non pedal playing.

M: It’s funny, because when I think about it, if it wasn’t for the internet, I’m not sure that I’d even be playing the steel today. I mean I’ve owned a lap steel longer than I’ve owned a computer, but I know that I would have never learned how to play, because I was so isolated from it.

L: Yeah, it put you in touch with like-minded guys across the United States—‘cause we’re all isolated, there wasn’t that much around for me. I couldn’t go see anyone else doing what I wanted to do initially. I mean, there were some nice guys, great pedal steel players out in Los Angeles and they were nice people and good at what they did, but they weren’t doing what I was doing, so I really couldn’t glean that much from them. They were good musicians and I could glean that much from them, but it wasn’t until JW (Jeremy Wakefield) came along, and he’d been playing way under the radar, then all of a sudden there was another guy in town playing the same stuff as me and that was good.

M: Were you really interested in gear at that time?

L: I’m like a poor…a gear head…but with no money. I’d hustle a cool amp together and make it happen and then I’d trade it on for something else. I’ve never really had a collection of stuff—I’ve always had a nice guitar to play and a nice amp to use. I’ve tried a lot of different things and a lot of different brands. Probably the one I’ve got now is the one I’ve been most happiest with….

M: That’s the Sierra?

L: Yeah, it’s an early Sierra, a ’64 Sierra Wright Custom.

M: It sounds beautiful.

L: It sounds very similar to the Bigsby I owned. It’s 24 ½ scale. They are Chuck Wright pickups but what I did was scrounge some Bigsby magnets from Todd Clinesmith and I upped the inductance of the pickups quite a bit. It went from sounding good to really good—smoother, more extended bass. It was more noticeable in the bass.

M: Chuck’s pickups had a really unique sound…

L: A lot of them have this really scooped out, really unique sound—you hear it on “Crazy Arms” with Jimmy Day playing that Quad. It’s that sound. I like it, but I don’t like it—it’s not for me. I like hearing Jimmy Day with it, but I wanted to get away from that. My guitar had a little of that going on, but not as much as Day’s. The magnet thing seemed to cure that. There were 2 types of pickups he made: the blade one and the pole piece one and mine is a blade which, for all intents and purposes, is identical to a Bigsby. I just put a Bigsby magnet in mine and it made the guitar more “hi-fi” and also more microphonic. When I hit pedals and stuff I can hear it. To me, it’s like riding an old 1949 Harley.

M: I really think that adds a lot to the sound. With most of the good recordings I hear, like yours and JW’s, you can hear all the dynamics coming from the amp….

L: Yeah, definitely. They’re more honest sounding guitars, I think, and they’re just so beautiful looking…a Bigsby, or a really nice Rickenbacher console, or an early Wright Custom….beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But back to Maurice Anderson, who said there’s something about when you sit down behind a pretty guitar that’s pleasing to your eye—you will play better. I sit down at my guitar and I think, “God, you’re pretty!” And I made the cabinet, so maybe it’s sort of like I’ve got a little bit of extra pride in it

Originally when I got the guitar it was made of…the top platforms were made of mahogany and the back aprons were made of plywood and everything was skinned in a cherry formica veneer. I think he was the first guy to make formica guitars. It didn’t sound bad, but I had all this wood lying around because for a long time I’d been a French polisher—I repaired antique furniture. So, I said, ‘you know what, I’m gonna take this apart and rebuild it.” I had fiddle back cherry and western quilted maple and I just used the original body parts as a pattern and remade it and finished it. I put it all back together with the original mechanism and everything. I did that because I wanted the guitar to look like a ‘50s one, beautiful maple and all.

M: How many pedals do you have on the guitar?

L: Well, the guitar originally had 9 pedals with no knee levers and I use 6–2 of the pedals work on both necks and there’s 4 pedal changes on the front neck.

M: Do you use an E13 copedent?

L: I use F13, Boggs’ tuning and I just have the split pedal change like Vance did on the Bob Wills and Billy Jack stuff and the front neck is probably considered just standard C6 changes, but it’s in Bb6. But I do have the option…the pedals that operate the back neck also come to the front neck and they lower the high 3rd and the high root ½ tone, so when I go to the IV chord, I can fake Bud Isaacs’ changes there. That lowers the 3rd to the 2nd and the root down to the maj7. It’s backwards—a lot of guys did that in the ‘50s—they got these E9 things in 6th tunings. I first picked up on it on Brisbane Bop. I remember telling a couple of old-timers about it and they were like, “Oh yeah, everyone was doing that.” [laughs]

M: I’ll admit, I’ve always had trouble digesting that stuff…I try to envision but it doesn’t make all that much sense to me.

L: Well, I don’t really have a comprehensive understanding of it, either—I try and approach it from the old way of just looking at those things as “chord changers”….

M: That’s what I’m hearing when I listen to you, I don’t hear a lot of pedal action, but every once in a while there’s this chord….

L: Right, I really believe it’s still primarily non-pedal playing, but there are these chord changers.

M: Right—I hear a lot of bar movement as opposed to staying in position….

L: Well, I’m just trying to find those notes [laughs]. I honestly really believe that the most interesting pedal steel players—guys like Chalker and Vance—they were damn good non-pedal players first. I think it makes you understand the tuning better and makes you more of an individual.

Go to Part 4

Posted in Conversation with.... | Tagged bigsby, lee jeffriess, vance terry, wright custom | Leave a comment

Conversation with Lee Jeffriess, Part 2

Posted on July 7, 2011 by Mike Neer

M: Do you think you picked up a good sound approach from the beginning or did you have to go back and correct a lot of bad habits?

L: I’m sure I’ve got a ton of bad habits and stuff. The only thing I would say is, I think the key is you’ve got to get the information but you can’t let it take you over. Do you know what I mean? It’s like you’ve got to take it in, try and understand it and then forget it and make your own language from it or something. I wish that I’d been more studious, to be honest, but the other side of the coin is you throw yourself in there and you make it happen—you pull it out of the air. You don’t sit down and transcribe and study, you just keep playing and get all over the guitar and play it and listen to a lot of people. I remember when I sat down to listen to Speedy and Jimmy, I really wasn’t interested in what notes Speedy was playing—I was trying to suck up the energy of it.

M: That’s the one thing I get when I listen to you—I hear that energy and I hear the overall sound. It’s like you’re a conduit of that kind of energy.

L: Well, I appreciate that! I think it’s his mantra of just dig yourself in a hole and then dig yourself out, just throw yourself out there. I think that’s where the energy comes from, just this crazy nervous stuff that he manifests, and Vance had it, too. That’s the danger, man. Speedy had this one path, like a Shaolin monk, his thing was just throw it out there. And it makes for exciting guitar playing. I mean, you are going to fall on your ass, too, you know? That’s the other side of it. I mean, I might have these skeletal themes but in a live setting I just try to play it completely off the top of my head as much as I can. And sometimes there isn’t anything in my head, and other times, bingo! Everything you try comes off….

M: I don’t think I could play music unless I played it like that.

L: It ain’t there all the time, sometimes your receiver’s not tuned in, is it?

M: No, but I’ve learned how to live with denial, like that never happened! Once those notes are gone, they’re real gone.

L: There’s nothing like a night when you’re on and the band’s cooking and there’s feedback from the audience. That excitement’s contagious, people are dancing…I’m really adamant about if I’m going to go out and play music with people, there’s got to be people dancing. I’m not interested…you know, we’ll do stuff that’s introspective like On The Alamo or something like that which is nice and breaks up the pace, but most of the time I want people to dance.

M: And yet, you write such pretty, introspective songs…

L: [laughs] Well, I’ve been constantly rewriting Moonlight Serenade. [laughs] I’ll tell you what—it’s a piece of music I’ve been obsessed with since I’ve been about 8 or 9 years old. I think it’s my earliest recollection of hearing music, there’s something about it. It’s haunted me all of my life.

You know, I wish that more people were in tune with just flat out beautiful, pretty music. I look around and see these people and all they listen to is this bizarre negative, atonal crap. I’m sorry, that’s what it is to my ears. Or you know, borderline satanic rock music and it’s just like heartbreaking. They can’t sit down and appreciate something like Claire de Lune or Parker With Strings—some of the most beautiful music ever made. I feel sorry for them that they don’t have that in their lives.

M: That’s why when someone does come along and shows an interest in music we’re so quick to want to help them out and bring them along, because it’s rare. It’s rare when someone is that hungry for it and if you can bring beauty to them, that’s doing a good thing.

L: Yea, people have done it for me—I’ve been fortunate enough to meet a lot of cool people and they’ve helped me along the way. I’ve asked a lot of questions—I’ve talked to a lot of old-timers and I picked their brains and some of them probably thought I was a pain in the ass, but I just had a thirst to know.

M: Well, I’m so glad you did, because you got a lot stuff from them that would be gone now.

L: I’ve got to mention this guy because barely anyone knows who this guy is. I’ve sat down with Joaquin Murphey and watched him play, right, and seriously that’s a pretty major thing to have happened in my life. I met Speedy and Bobby Koeffer and Herb Remington and Billy Tonneson, you know, I feel blessed. But there’s one guy I met and I’ve seen him play a couple of times and just will never get the recognition those guys had and he was just as much monster. He had a completely unique style—the closest thing you could think of would be Koeffer, but with way more dissonance and altered harmony. His name is Frank Kay and he’s still alive and he lives in Kansas City. Frank led a really big Western Swing band in KC right through the ’50s—in the early ’50s he toured with Cowboy Copas. He was good friends with Koeffer, Hank Garland, anyone who came from Kansas City knew Frank Kay and/or played with him. At one time he played twin steels with Curly Chalker and Thumbs Carlyle was the guitar player, he really did play with some heavyweight guys and he had all their respect as well, he was of their caliber, too.

I was introduced to Frank about 12-15 years ago and I went to his home several times and watched him play and he primarily played McAuliffe E13 and he sounded like a jazz pianist. He was that sophisticated. He played stuff that I have no idea how the hell he got to it. I’d stop him and say “what were you doing?” and he’d play me the chord back and I’d ask “that was the chord you just did?” and he’d say “yeah, but you know it’s the chord that came before and the chord that came after it, your mind fills in the blanks.”

I was really interested in how he got to that point and he said “Look, in the mid 50s there were guys that came from Herman’s band and some that played with Basie and I could hire them. They’d put on a western shirt and come play with me. At one point I had this kid–I called him a kid but he was only 2 years younger than me—and he studied with Dodo Marmarosa.” And he goes “I had a helluva time trying to find these guitar players that play that really good comp, those Eldon Shamblin type passing chords. I sat down with that piano player and I said there’s got to be a way I can fake this on the steel, can you help me figure it out? And the piano player said, “Sure, write out how that thing’s tuned” and the guy studied on it and they got together and he said “Here you go Frank, I’ve kind of laid out some substitutions you can play” and I just wrote it out in tab….” I’m probably not telling this in the most accurate way, but basically that was the premise. And Frank just ran with the ball. It was like the beginning of his rebirth of his style. Even Chalker recognized it, too. I know someone else who independently met Chalker and said, “hey, do you know Frank Kay?” and Chalker just turned around and said, “Frank Kay’s probably one of the best steel players I’ve ever seen!” And you know you never heard Chalker compliment anyone. [laughs] That was pretty enlightening. I remember walking away from the first time I’d seen him play going, “Man, you really don’t need a pedal steel when you can do what he can do.”

M: He got the information from the best possible source, you know piano players.

L: Interesting, I think some of the hipper steel players were hip to piano, like Joaquin was hardcore into Shearing and Peterson.

M: I think it’s right around the time of Spade Cooley’s Dance-O-Rama record that I really noticed the extended harmonies in Joaquin’s playing.

L: Absolutely, He’s thinking more chordally at that point isn’t he?

Hawaii hana Hou – Joaquin Murphey

M: And that Hawaii Forever tape might be some of my favorite of all his playing—that’s a side of his playing that I really love.

L: It’s beautiful, man. There’s some really beautiful outros things on there that are very Shearing-like the way he starts stacking chords up. Back to Debussy, I guess—there’s a lot of Debussy in Shearing.

There’s a few people that didn’t get it—it was too understated for them. I was like, “You kind of got to give it a chance.” It’s very mellow and they couldn’t understand this other facet of his playing, they were so used to Joaquin’s crazy flights; that’s there in there, too, I mean he plays some beautiful single note things in there, but by this point he really knows what he’s doing with that tuning and he’s added pedals to it and he’s getting some beautiful chords.

Go to Part 3

Posted in Conversation with.... | Tagged Curly Chalker, joaquin murphey, speedy west | 3 Comments

Conversation with Lee Jeffriess, Part 1

Posted on July 7, 2011 by Mike Neer

Lee Jeffriess, to many of us, needs no introduction. He has been one of the driving forces in the revitalization of steel guitar in Rockabilly and Western Swing for more than 15 years. As a member of Big Sandy and the Fly-Rite Boys, he was inducted into the Rockabilly Hall of Fame. His playing was a big part of the sound of that band: his boundless energy and exciting bursts of sound alternating with sweet melancholy and longing ala Speedy West. He also recorded a wonderful instrumental CD with guitarist John Munnerlyn, called Guitars In Perspective. Today, Lee leads the Western swing unit the West Coast Ramblers in the Bay area. I had a chance to speak with Lee, who not only is an encyclopedia of steel guitar and music, but also a very interesting guy.

Blues for Earl – John Munnerlyn & Lee Jeffriess

Mike: Hi Lee, first of all I’d like to thank you for helping to open up the doors of steel guitar for me.

Lee: I’m the gateway drug, right?

M: I don’t know whether to thank you or blame you.

L: I’ve always said this: the thing is a can of worms, you know? It’s addictive and once you get in it’s all over, if you really get hooked. It consumes you, I mean, I’m driving down the freeway or my wife is trying to tell me something and I’m thinking “what was Vance doing there?”

M: It’s true. A friend of mine once told me that all steel players were crazy and just locked themselves up in their rooms learning how to play….

L: Well, I think that’s true of some of them, like anyone else—bank managers or airline pilots—I think a few of them are kind of eccentric. And then there’s guys like Vance who seemed to be a really level-headed, sober, super-smart guy and there wasn’t anything particularly odd about him. Just like anything else, it’s a mixed bag of people.

M: So, tell me about your musical background—did you play any other instruments before you took up the steel?

L: When I was a kid I played in a marching band, I played the tenor snare. It probably was the first band I ever played in—I was about 12 years old. And then, in the last year of high school, I started taking upright bass lessons with a Dixieland Jazz bass player. I wasn’t interested in Dixieland, per se, but I kind of liked it but I wasn’t hardcore about it. I had the Rockabilly bug and was listening to all these old Sun records, you know, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison….

M: Did you see any connection between the two types of music at all?

L: Yeah, the bass playing is almost identical—very syncopated, a lot of slap, there’s a lot of similarities. I got busted going into the music room (at school) and slapping the bass and the teacher said, “Don’t come in here and just mess around on this thing. If you want I’ll get you lessons, there’s a guy who’ll come around and teach you.” And fortunately for me, it wasn’t a classical guy—it was a Dixieland player. I just did this crude slap thing and the guy went, “Wow, that’s pretty good—you’re interested in this style. I play this stuff.” So that was kind of cool—unfortunately, it was the last 2 or 3 months of high school. It was just enough for him to show me some things.

When I got out of school, I had a job washing dishes at this big, fancy hotel and saved up all my money and bought an upright bass and got into it. I played it until I was about 24.

M: There are always gigs available for bass players.

L: Yeah, I got to play with a wide variety of people. It took a while to get good enough, maybe 2 or 3 years. I still enjoy it now—I still own an upright and a couple of years ago I had the opportunity to play professionally again, after nearly 20 years, with T.K. Smith (guitarist) and a Jazz fiddle player—we had a little trio. It was a lot of fun and I’d kind of forgotten how pleasurable it is to just be the bass player and make the groove.

M: It’s a completely different type of focus than playing steel guitar.

L: Completely different. With bass, you’re the foundation, and with steel you’re all the pretty filling in between.

M: What was it that piqued your interest in steel guitar?

L: Well, I was 14 or 15 and getting into Rockabilly and there was guy who was probably about 15 years older than me at the time and he played music locally, and we hooked up—he was playing in pubs and stuff—he was doing really Rockabilly/Sun Records kind of stuff. We didn’t really take him seriously, though, because he looked like a regular guy. We were all into the blue jeans with the big cuffs and having our hair all slicked, wearing ‘50s clothes and we thought he was square–it was a really shallow, face-value assessment. But he befriended us and that was the beginning of my real musical education. He would say “That stuff’s cool, but listen to this…” and “You like this, don’t you? It’s because you like this, too” and he put it all together for me and introduced me to a wide gambit of music. Especially guitar players like Tal Farlow, Barney Kessel, Merle Travis, and Gershwin and Debussy, and weird stuff.

M: That’s what we all need: someone to steer us in the right direction, get some wind in our sails.

L: I feel very, very fortunate, because I meet so many people that don’t know anything about music or the history of music. They think it’s just what’s on the radio and they have no idea where it all comes from—the rich history of American music. I guess what I’m trying to say is this guy opened the doors for me and I started working backward.

To answer your question, it would be discovering real good Rockabilly and then getting turned on to this other kind of Country music—I started going back listening to Hillbilly and Western Swing, initially more 1930s sounding stuff, but then I gravitated to a specific time period and it would be 1947-’53, Los Angeles-based stuff, thinking “this is the medium I like the best harmonically.” It’s got cool Rhythm and Blues in it and they were messing with Kenton ideas, too, implying them at least, with the Western Caravan. I remember being just floored by the Western Caravan when I heard them. They had great ideas and then Murphey just blowin’ his top over everything—super-arranged stuff with Murphey is just mind-blowing.

M: It’s amazing to me that this style of music completely flew under my radar. It wasn’t until about 10 years ago that a few west coast friends hooked me up—there wasn’t anyone that I’d ever known in the New York area that was hip to it. And yet, here you are in England….

L: Well, like I said, I started at a certain point and started working backward…I believe in the Law of Attraction. When you start looking for something, it’ll come to you—you’ll find it. I remember looking at a picture of Vance Terry, a promo picture of him in I think ’63, and he’s sitting down at this crazy Sierra Wright Custom doubleneck, and I’m goin’, “Man, I just gotta see one of these guitars, I’ve got to have one. This thing looks like it was made on another planet. I have to have one of these.” A year later, I’ve got one…. And the same thing with Bigsby—I was talking to a guy in England in 1990, asking him all about a Bigsby because he’d seen one when he’d been to the states and I knew Speedy played one and I’d seen a photograph of one…literally 7 months later I owned one. When you hyper-focus on things, you know?

Maurice Anderson talks about this stuff a lot and he applies it to playing music. I remember reading a quote by him saying, “You should never practice unless you really want to. If you don’t want to, or you just do it out of rote or whatever, you don’t learn anything or get anything out of it.” I remembered what he said and I thought, “Wow, this is really informative—it felt like some of the information was some of the best wisdom I’d ever heard on the subject. He went as far as to say “some of my best practice is done in my head, driving around.” I think the big thing that he’s sort of getting across is the visualization, whether about a material item or a musical goal–just maybe reprogramming yourself to think about things in a different way.

M: Do you recall your first steel guitar?

L: Yes, it was made by a guy called George Denley in the UK in the ‘60s. It was sold under Rotosound—they sold it in their catalogue. It was a really well-made, professional single 10 pedal steel. It looked a lot like a Sho-Bud fingertip, or something like that.

M: Was it set up in E9 copedent?

L: Yea, when I got it I took it to a guy who was a professional pedal steel player in the Southampton area, really good pedal steel player, top-notch, like a studio-type musician, and he just said, “Oh, you’re interested in this kind of stuff, we’ll put it in a 6th tuning” and he rearranged the pedals and everything. He put the option there and I said, “oh, I’m not gonna use that, I don’t want pedals, I just want to play it as a non-pedal instrument” and the guy was like, “Well, let’s just do it anyway, ‘cause you never know, you might want to get into it.” He didn’t force it on me or anything, didn’t say “why are you doing this, all you need is E9, don’t be silly”—of course, everyone after that said it to me….

M: He must have asked what kind of music you were into….

L: He said, “Bring me some music that you’re interested in, let me hear what it is you want to get into.” I brought him over some cassettes of Spade Cooley and Bob Wills and he knew who those guys were. His main bag was like a Lloyd Green E9 type of thing….

M: You never had any interest in doing that?

L: No, never. I mean I have an appreciation of it now and I’ve made a couple of attempts to sort of try it but I just don’t feel it, I guess. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy it—it wasn’t ’til about maybe 5 or 6 years ago that I actually sat down and listened to Lloyd on those Little Darlin’ records with Paycheck and Ralph Mooney with Wynn Stewart and then I got it. Man, it’s just so soulful.

M: At what point did you decide to move to the US?

L: Well, I got a job playing with another English guy, actually from my hometown, as well, a guy called Carl “Sonny” Leyland and he called me up one day. He’d been living in New Orleans for a 5 or 6 years at this point in 1991 and he was just bitchin’ about how he’d just gone through his 7th bass player and he couldn’t get anyone to stick it out, they were always wrong and weren’t into the right stuff, just playing noodly kind of Jazz bass. I just literally jokingly said, “Buy me an airline ticket and a bass and I’ll come out and play with you”, you know just totally messing around and he went silent and then said, “…Would ya?” And I was like, “Yeah, I guess I would.” He told me to make the arrangements, “quit your job, ’cause you can make this amount a month, I’ll rent you a house….” It was the most money I ever made playing music.

M: How much time did you spend in New Orleans?

L: I was only there 3 months…[laughs], but I did a lot of work! The biggest compliment I ever had playing music was, we were playing in this backyard and this big, old black lady ran out of the kitchen and she was standing and she goes, “Goddammit! You’re white!” [laughs] That was pretty cool.

M: Did you bring your steel guitar with you?

L: No, my experience with steel at point was that it was pretty painful the noise that was being made from it and I kind of went, “Shit, this is really hard!” So it went under the bed. [laughs]

M: Well, I’m really happy to know it’s not just me!

L: Well, I was only down for a few months, though…[laughs] I had the bug by then.

M: In that short time you were in New Orleans, did you get a chance to play with other musicians?

L: There was a great guitar player in town called Steve Spitz who also plays pedal steel and Steve is just a local guy that everyone knows, very funny guy, and he just played the most badass 50s R&B, like Johnny Guitar Watson, just scary. And he had the steel bug, too, and he turned me on to a guy called Johnny Bonvillian and put me together with him. At the time I didn’t have a steel but he gave me his phone number and said “You should talk to this guy.” This guy knew Joaquin and Boggs and people like that. This was the first time I’d had a direct connection to the past, like a real direct one. I remember going to him a year or so later when I was on the road with Big Sandy and then sitting down with him just playing my guitar and saying, “This is what Joaquin would’ve done,” and he’d pick a tune, “Joaquin would do it like this” or “Boggs would have played it like this” and he could perfectly imitate them. Still his own man, but that was mind-numbing to see someone to sit down and really do it in front of you. He asked me to play and he was pretty non-plussed—he was like, “Yeah, you’ve got a lot of woodshedding to do, kid!” [laughs] That was kind of brutal, but that’s the kick in the ass you need. Back then I had the bug pretty strongly and really threw myself into the deep end.

Go to Part 2

(This interview may not be reproduced without the permission of Mike Neer.)

Posted in Conversation with.... | Tagged "Lee Jeffriess" "Big Sandy" "Joaquin Murphey" "Noel Boggs" Spade Cooley" Rockabilly "Western Swing" | 1 Comment

Some exciting new things for Lap Steelin’

Posted on June 30, 2011 by Mike Neer

I’m really stoked to announce that I have some really great things brewing for the Lap Steelin’ blog beginning in a few short weeks. I will begin a series of interviews with some of the top players in the world! Being as much a fan of the steel guitar as I am a player, I will be touching on all things steel guitar in the hopes of sharing some more of the mysteries of the instrument through their eyes, ears and hands. I can’t tell you how excited I am about this.

I was an avid reader of Guitar Player magazine back in its heyday and I learned many things from the interviews they conducted. In fact, just today Jas Obrecht gave me some tips on recording telephone interviews! I hope to make this as pleasurable and educational an experience as I can. I’ll keep you posted!

Posted in Fresh baked thoughts, News | Leave a comment

The shape of lap steel guitar music to come

Posted on June 7, 2011 by Mike Neer

The lap steel guitar has always been an instrument with a strong connection to the past; in fact, because of its perceived limitations, it was rendered obsolete by technological developments in pedal/changer mechanisms, just as the music of its heyday had become obsolete. Although pedal steel became the choice of nearly every player of Country and Country Rock music in the 1960s and 70s, the traditionalists playing Western Swing, Sacred Steel and Hawaiian music continued playing non-pedal instruments (for the most part). However, this wasn’t enough to revitalize interest in the lap steel guitar. It wasn’t until the appearance of players like David Lindley and the discovery of Freddie Roulette that the instrument became more visible to guitarists who heard the sound and said, “Whoa!” (I think that’s pretty much exactly what I said when I heard David.) The lap steel would begin to appear on recordings again beginning in the 70s, adding flavor and atmosphere to many records. It can be heard in myriad styles of music, from Progressive Rock (Yes), to Alt-Country (Greg Leisz), Modern Jazz (Greg Leisz with Bill Frisell), to Hip Hop (Mike “Slo-Mo” Brenner) to Blues (Sonny Rhodes) to eclectic singer/songwriter amalgamations (Ben Harper) and many others. There was the “discovery” of sacred steel guitar in the ’90s through the release of recordings on the Arhoolie label that let many of us in on a beautiful secret that had existed outside of the mainstream for decades. In my opinion, this was a pivotal event in the timeline of the steel guitar and its full effects have yet to be seen.

There have been several players of the younger generations who have embraced the lap steel guitar and are making good music with it, such as Kaki King and Andrew Winton. No doubt inspired by the likes of Kelly Joe Phelps, Ben Harper and Jeff Lang, many players have begun to incorporate it into their songwriting, using interesting techniques which borrow from fingerstyle guitar. Recently, I’ve heard steel players using looping and many other types of signal processing to create ambient soundscapes, something which has been explored previously by Bruce Kaphan and Chas Smith on the pedal steel, and Bill Elm on the lap steel, among others. Nels Cline has contributed some nice steel playing to Wilco recordings and live performances. There is no shortage of enthusiasm for the instrument, although many who play it are playing it as a secondary instrument.

What I’m saying here is nothing new. There will always be traditionalists who are dedicated to preserving the integrity of traditional music forms, such as Hawaiian music, Sacred Steel and Western Swing, where they tend to like to keep it pure. There are many wonderful players of both those styles, as we all know. They are dedicated to its preservation as much for its cultural significance as anything else. They are the keepers of the flame. I can appreciate that point of view and I’m thankful for their dedication. However, I don’t fall into that category myself. I have never desired to be a keeper of the flame. I have played styles of music which were rooted in traditional styles, and I’d always tried to absorb the essence of the music without actually becoming a slave to it, in hopes of bringing something fresh to it. In several reviews I have read of my efforts, both in the studio and live, I have been called a “traditional” player, which flattered and disappointed me at the same time. I don’t expect a layman to be able to distinguish between strict traditional playing and not, but it did make me think and quite possibly triggered my quest to become a deeper student of tradition.

Then there are the players at the vanguard of a newer movement of electric steel playing, incorporating loops and effects and creating ethereal sounds. This is a striking contrast to the Blues/Rock players who play in a more aggressive style with a biting, overdriven sound. There is something very sexy about the sound of the lap steel when it is played right in this context! But with the sound sculptors, you are hearing the magic of the instrument working in concert with technology, when it is done at the highest level. It can be a beautiful thing.

I have long embraced technology and in the years before I became devoted to the lap steel, I spent a significant amount of time learning about effects and how to get a wide variety of sounds. There is a great feeling that comes along with being able to harness the power of technology in order to create new sounds, some of which are born in the mind and others which unfold from serendipity. The more knowledge you have, the more you will be able to contribute musically. I have also embraced the pursuit of excellence on the instrument, believing in the importance of having freedom on the instrument to express yourself in any way. This consists of having great right hand technique, seamless manipulation of the bar and complete knowledge of the fretboard in several tunings. The only path to that end is deep, serious practice and discovery. Study of traditional styles is the gateway to understanding and achieving that kind of excellence on the instrument. You can learn from the past, but it doesn’t mean you have to be stuck there.

I have often wondered why there are so few steel guitarists who embrace both technology and technique. It is hard to imagine that an instrument as old as lap steel guitar is really young in its development into today’s music. I see that as a very positive thing. But I still believe that the key to the future exists in our past.

I have been working very hard on something that is very special to me. I have been developing some new sounds and techniques that are based on the synthesizer. To clarify, I’m not interested in playing a guitar synth, but I am interested in treating the sounds of my steels as one would treat a synthesizer, with the use of filters, LFOs, VCOs and several other tools. This stems from a long love affair I’ve had with the sounds of analog synthesizers in the 1970s, from Funk and Soul recordings to Jazz Fusion. I believe I am getting closer to something special and it is stuff like this that I consider to be the real Fountain of Youth. Ponce de León would approve!

Posted in Fresh baked thoughts | 3 Comments

More on the subtle nuances of style

Posted on June 2, 2011 by Mike Neer

There are so many little details about steel guitar playing and the production of great, expressive tone, that it can be overwhelming to players who are learning the instrument. But this is where we begin to use our ears–those great tools of ours which can help us decipher the magic contained in simple audio waveforms. We listen to the details in the playing of others and we get goose pimples or even chuckle at the different levels of genius we uncover, and yet we don’t always remember to listen to our own playing with the same critical ears. Why? Ever notice the difference in the way your hair looks after the barber or stylist finishes your hair? You try to repeat it the next morning but you end up looking like the same old you. It is the attention to detail and the knowledge of how to execute those finer points that makes all the difference.

I’ve talked already about vibrato and the use of glissando and portamento in phrases, now I’d like to touch on the the flow of the notes. This will be an area that will require me to go into a lot of detail, since it is hard to explain. I will probably have to use some musical examples to get the point across.

One of the things you will realize, hopefully, when playing in a tuning such as C6 is that it requires a little extra control from the right hand. This is good because it forces us to pay stricter attention to the picking fingers in order to be able to cleanly articulate without the addition of adjacent strings and, subsequently, unwanted notes (particularly the string tuned to the 6th). This careful little detail will really make a big difference in the presentation and the effort will not go unnoticed. If we are constantly locked into playing in a position across the strings, we will need to develop extremely tight tolerances in our blocking or else our notes will just ring into each other and cause a big blur, almost like keeping your foot on the sustain pedal on your piano. Not good; not good at all.

So, one of the things we want to do when playing single notes on adjacent strings is to cut off the previous note at precisely the time we are sounding the next note (unless, of course, we are playing staccato or there are rests between notes). We do this with blocking. There are several different ways that we can block, but being that this is a process which we will use very often in many different situations, it is good to get a handle on several methods. Here they are: pick blocking, palm blocking and bar blocking. Pick blocking is the most common for me and it essentially works like this: after a note is struck, the same finger will fall back onto the string to stop it from ringing as the next note is sounded. If you’ve ever played fingerstyle guitar or banjo, you may already be familiar with this technique. Two of the important things are the timing of the blocking and the unobtrusiveness of it. It is preferable to hear as little of the sound of the pick blocking the string as possible. Sometimes you may hear a little metal clack–this can be lessened by decreasing the force of the pick on the string and by making the block happen with a short, quick contact of pick to string.

As for palm blocking, it is simply the process of lowering the palm of the right hand to deaden the strings. In the case of the treble strings, we may have to use our finger (either ring or pinky) which may require us to extend the pinky. I’m not very comfortable playing in that position–I like to keep those fingers curled for the most part, but on a specific difficult passage, I may do so. That is the thing about playing steel: we sometimes need to look ahead because of the techniques involved. If we are improvising, without a firm grasp of these techniques, we are forced to play a certain way; if we do have a firm grasp on techniques such as blocking, we can do so a bit more freely without having to be locked in to certain patterns. As an improviser, I have found this to be essential. Palm blocking, when done correctly, can resemble almost a slight bouncing of your right hand on the strings. I really like the staccato quality I can get from this technique and I employ it at specific times for effect.

Bar tipping is another useful technique which requires one to simply lift or tip the back end of the bar so that only the nose of the bar comes into contact with the strings, leaving the palm of the left hand to dampen behind the bar. This is an old school technique used by many of the Hawaiian players, such as Sol Hoopii. Of course, a bullet bar is required for this technique and you will find out just how useful the rounded nose of the bar can be. This is one area where Stevens bar users are missing the boat, although some of the modern Stevens-style bars have a slightly rounded tip.

Another technique, which is one that I don’t think I ever employ, is bar lifting. This is when you completely lift the bar off the strings to stop a note or notes from ringing. I have heard that are some players who use this, such as Cindy Cashdollar, but I can’t say for sure (I should have noticed as I sat 2 ft. to the left of her as I accompanied her, but I didn’t).

Now, once we are comfortable employing the proper blocking techniques, we will be able to exhibit more control over the note flow (you will hear it once you’ve got it down). Gone will be the note overlap, unless it is something you want at a specific time for effect. It must say, it is pretty satisfying when you can play across the strings with great note separation. Palm blocking is particularly good for this. Either way, it will require shifting of the picking hand across the strings. Many players play thumb/index, or thumb/middle or even thumb/index/middle, which can be very effective for specific rhythmic figures, such as triplets. These are all things to consider and they make a big difference.

The Hawaiian steel players that I learned from, such as Sol Hoopii and King Bennie, all had a slightly jazzy approach to playing and played both up and down the string (vertically) and across the strings (horizontally). Playing across the strings enabled them to have nice snapping rhythmic punch in their lines, while playing vertically made the notes more fluid, but also afforded the opportunity to employ machine gun-like picking. Also, you’ll very often hear the Hawaiian players getting a yodeling type sound on adjacent strings–this is a very distinctive sound. Limiting yourself to playing on one string, however, can be very beneficial in the long run for synchronization of the picking hand with the bar hand. You can develop your accuracy as you move the bar from fret to fret, sounding the notes at precisely the right time. It is great practice and I encourage everyone to try it. It is important that your left arm move in a straight line with the bar (well, as straight as possible) and avoid a wrist action. Using your wrist will cause the bar to move on an angle which can have several effects: for one the string is not making solid contact with the bar, resulting in a possible whiny tone; second, your intonation will suffer. Even vibrato should not come form the wrist alone; your arm should move in sympathy with your hand.

Harmonized notes benefit greatly from slanting in a sense that the flow does not need to be broken. This flow not only relates to the notes themselves, but also the picking hand, which can focus specifically on the same 2 strings, enabling you to do things such as trilling without having to break the flow (very effective). Slanting is a technique that is not difficult to do, but it is important to use a bar that you can manage in order to avoid having to turn your wrist. Bar control in slanting comes from the fingers only.

More to come, but I need to take a break for now. Enjoy this clip which exemplifies some of the ideas mentioned above:

Posted in Fresh baked thoughts, Lessons and Tips | Leave a comment

The subtle nuances of style

Posted on May 4, 2011 by Mike Neer

I’ve spent a lot of time working my way up to snuff on the steel guitar by going back to the beginning and working my way up through the styles of the times. Taking what I like from the players I sample and finding a way to combine different elements to suit the music I’m playing is always a fun, ear and eye-opening experience. What it involves is a lot of listening; listening to the subtle nuances which may not seem so apparent at the onset.

When I played acoustic steel guitar in the old time style, I was fond of players like Sol Hoopii, King Benny Nawahi, Sol K. Bright, Sam Ku, etc. Each had his own sound and there were little elements which distinguished them, making them easily recognizable to my ears. For King Benny it was easy; he played a National Triolian which only has 1 cone and has a distinctive sound. Sol Hoopii was also very distinct, especially his vibrato. It was little things like vibrato and the approach to sliding the bar that I spent time listening to the most. I never wanted to sound exactly like anyone else, but I always wanted my notes to have the stately and polished quality to them that Sol had, and the excitement of King Benny. The King could sound frantic at times, but always kept it together, whereas Sol H. always seemed so smooth. Sol’s vibrato was very wide and, while not as fast as Andy Iona’s, it really sang. I always admired Andy Iona’s vibrato–it lent an eeriness to his playing and seemed to come out of nowhere. I wanted to strike a balance between those 2 players and so I went to work.

In working on your vibrato, it is extremely important to make a conscientious effort to make it a part of your playing, not as an afterthought. I did this by working on playing short phrases and automatically ending them with sustaining vibrato, working on perfecting the speed and depth of the vibrato, too. Consistency is of the utmost importance! In sustaining a note, the vibrato should occur at the same frequncy throughout. Now this doesn’t mean you can’t use different speeds of vibrato on different songs, no–but within a tune, one should work as hard as possible to keep the vibrato consistent. After a few weeks, I no longer had to think about it, just as a singer doesn’t have to think about using vibrato. But the one little element of vibrato that we don’t think about as much, is when to actually start vibrating the note. I learned early on when I began singing Sinatra, that there was a very important pause before the vibrato begins–we have to let the last syllable sustain just enough to give the phrase a sense of completeness. That’s when the vibrato comes in. Put on some Sinatra and see what I mean. If he were to begin the vibrato any sooner than he does, it would just kill it, in my opinion. There is a big difference, though, between pausing before using vibrato and forgetting and then remembering to use it! Usually when that happens, the vibrato sounds uneven and rushed and, in turn, loses the polished sound we’re working on. It is possible to be sound polished and spontaneous at the same time, which has always been my goal.

Another thing I paid a lot of attention to was how to slide into notes. I really don’t particularly care for a lot of sliding around, as funny as that sounds. Unless I’m going for a specific effect, I try to keep slides short and sweet. Again, it creates a more polished sound. It takes a lot of listening and effort to rein it in. One of the ways I would work on this would be to play short little phrases of 4 or 5 notes, only using a slide on one of the notes, playing the phrase varying which note would get the slide (usually just a 1/2 step or even less). It helped me get more of a fluidity to the line with more articulation and a little more polish. It is really important to have control, enough so that even when you are improvising you are considering more than just the notes you are playing, but how you are playing them.

When I moved to playing electric, I tried to incorporate a lot of the playing style that I had learned previously, but I was not very happy with how it sounded. At this point, I had pretty much figured that playing electric was a different animal. A lot of the animated, exaggerated playing one can get away with on acoustic becomes magnified on electric. You can even hear in some of Sol’s earliest electric recordings that he was aware of this–he sounded a bit timid and restrained (although it was something he was able to overcome and adapt to exceptionally well). So, it became a process of breaking it down again bit by bit and listening to those players who were had done it right for guidance (Dick McIntire, Andy Iona, Jerry Byrd, Herb Remington, Leon McAuliffe, Joaquin Murphey, etc.). Again, so many distinctive styles, but enough of a palette to sample from and begin the process of refining my own style. At this point, I was moving away from the Hawaiian players a little, as I didn’t really intend to play Hawaiian music, and I wanted to make my sound a little more well-rounded or universal. Still, the one important aspect of Hawaiian playing that I can still say plays a major role in my playing is the way that Hawaiian players seemed to play along the length of the strings more than the Western Swing players did. Joaquin Murphey is an exception to this rule at times, but I know he was also influenced greatly by the Hawaiian style. Vibrato is still a major ingredient of my playing, but I had to use it a little more judiciously, as sometimes in the swing tunes it sounds a little out of place. If anything, I toned it down (that is until I heard Curly Chalker and his use of very wide, fast vibrato to simulate a horn section shout chorus–very expressive!).

Now, a little setback happened right around this time as well. I started using the C6 tuning and was having a hard time (as many guitar players seem to) and essentially had to begin learning the neck all over again. It really didn’t mean much to me to sit down with those big note charts that you print out–I needed to discover my own ‘zones’ as I called them earlier with students. The most practical way to do this was to begin transcribing tunes. I began with, I believe, Jerry Byrd’s “Slippery Elm” which I coincidentally videotaped so I wouldn’t forget it and that inspired me to take that a bit further, but I digress….One of the things I liked about Slippery Elm was the use of open strings and the fact that it seemed like a real challenge. So, now I had begun the transformation: I was using my vibrato more judiciously, I was using C6, and more importantly, I was absorbing more elements of style.

More to come, I promise…..

Posted in Fresh baked thoughts, Lessons and Tips | Tagged c6 tuning, Curly Chalker, jerry byrd, joaquin murphey, sol hoopii | 2 Comments

C6 tuning is perfect for “breadboarding”

Posted on April 15, 2011 by Mike Neer

C6 is the perfect tuning for breadboarding, no doubt about it. For those of you who don’t know the term “breadboarding,” it has to do with electronic circuits and how experimenters will use a breadboard as a construction base to create prototypes of circuits. Simply moving wires and jumpers around with solderless connections makes the experimentation much easier. In a past life I spent a lot of time with electronics….

For purposes of this discussion, I will be referring to this version of C6, from low to hi (gasp–I’ve gone against my own principles): G A C E G A C E. If you are looking to step outside of the box a bit and play some things that are a bit out of the ordinary for steel guitar, tweaking the C6 can play an important role in helping you achieve the chord qualities you are looking for. The most obvious tweak would be tuning the lowest C (in my tuning, string 6) to C#. This gives you the C6/A7 tuning which, in my opinion is necessary for playing Jazz and even any kind of chord solo work. The importance of the dominant chord in that tuning can’t be stressed enough. Also, contained within the span of strings 4, 5 and 6 is a diminished triad. Crucial.

Another common tweak is to tune string 7 (A) up to Bb for a C13. This eliminates the root for our minor chords, which I feel is pretty important note to have for playing Jazz standards and even some Rock tunes. There are some arrangements I play, though, that are based around this tuning, particularly Mercy, Mercy, Mercy and Yellow Roses.

What if we tweak both the C string and the A string up a half step? I got this little tuning from Billy Hew Len (although he did it with the A6 tuning) and I quickly recognized it as a tuning used by the great Joaquin Murphey. Joaquin used a C6 tuning with a high G string later on, and he would also raise his C and A strings 1/2 step. A good example of this sound can be found on Spade Cooley‘s Dance-A-Rama record. You can hear an example of this tuning (my version with a high E) on this recording of Coconut Grove. It makes use of a lot of altered dominant chords.

There are other places we can tweak the tuning, too: my favorite is to re-tune string 8. I have several variations on it and all of them give me different results. The most common for me is to tune string 8 to F, especially for playing chord melodies. I approach it a little like John Scofield does when he is playing solo–he stabs at individual chord tones just to establish the harmony in the listener’s ears while he plays a melody or improvises on top of it. Sometimes that chord tone will only last for an eighth note. String 8 also serves me well for playing more modern Jazz, such as Herbie Hancock and Eddie Harris, by tuning it down to D. There I have what we call slash chords (a triad over a different bass note), particularly the 11th chord flavor, ie. C/D (C triad over D bass note). A great, nebulous sound.

There are other very useful ways of changing the value of a C6 tuning by changing 1 or 2 strings. For those of you familiar with Speedy West, he occasionally used a tuning (although on a pedal steel) which was called F#9. Essentially what it is is an E6 tuning (low to hi B C# E G# B C# E G#)(arrrgh), with the B strings tuned down to A#. If you look at the C6 tuning that I use (with the E string on top), it is the same structure as the E6 tuning down a major third. So, in this case we simply lower our G to F# and voila!: we have D9 tuning.

I am currently beginning another book–this time on creating block chord arrangements or chord melodies. I will be using my C6 tuning for the basis of the entire book, but I will also be sharing some of my secret tweaks. I am really looking forward to the challenge of teaching this!

In the meantime, I hope you continue to explore and have fun and always remember that lurking somewhere inside of you is you! Let’s give him every opportunity to find his voice on the steel guitar. Always play with the curiosity of a child.

All for now. By the way, it pains me so to see those tunings spelled backwards. You won’t be seeing that from me again.

Posted in Fresh baked thoughts, Lessons and Tips | Leave a comment

Things happen for a reason….

Posted on April 9, 2011 by Mike Neer

This has been an intense week for me. It started off with a nasty computer virus which not took out my main boot drive, but also took 3 or 4 of the transcriptions I’d been working on with it. I fought long and hard to get it all back, to no avail. The good news is: at least I’m back up and running and my computer is even a little faster than before.

But I’m feeling a little nostalgic tonight because I’ve had some heavy thoughts on my mind lately, particularly about music. It was about 7 years ago that I immersed myself in steel guitar, not knowing exactly why or how. Let me explain: for years I’d been haunted by the sound, so much to the point that I’d even begun to emulate steel guitar on my Stratocaster (pretty well, I might add) with a Sears socket wrench. At the time, I was mostly playing Soul, and New Orleans R&B, along with some Jazz. It would be a few years before I took the plunge, but I was already beginning to get the stink eye from some of my bandmates. I just couldn’t help myself, and I blame it on Speedy West and later, Gabby Pahinui.

Once I did try to learn steel guitar, I went right to Hawaiian music, particularly pre-War (Sol Hoopii, Dick McIntire, Andy Iona). I figured if I was going to learn, I might as well start from the beginning. I had essentially put another part of my musical existence (the main part) on hold while I pursued this bizarre fantasy of playing steel. I have to say, this is very much in line with the kind of crazy things I do (you can ask anyone who knows me well), but usually I take what I can from it and move on. In this case, I stuck with it.

When I got to the point where I could play a bit, I moved over to electric and started decoding Western Swing players and early Country players. Took a helluva long time for me to make any progress, but I had Speedy West in my sights. I would not be satisfied until I learned some Speedy material (which seemed so impossible to me at one time). The LPs that I purchased from Matt Umanov’s store in the 80s really wormed their way into my brain. Steel Guitar Spectacular by Speedy is my favorite of all and in my opinion one of the finest steel guitar records ever made.

It’s never been my design to actually become a legit Country or Western Swing or Hawaiian player. I would never be happy to do that in the long term–in the short term, yes, but I become bored easily (a character flaw). My goal has always been to learn how to play the steel guitar the very best I could but I ended up taking the scenic route. But today I am standing at the fork in the road–the place where I’ve longed to be for a long time. It’s time for me pick up from where I left off musically, except now I have a new instrument and in turn, a whole new fresh approach to playing the music I love. In my musical world, Frank Sinatra co-exists with D’Angelo and Stevie Wonder and John Scofield and Speedy West. These are the sounds that I’ve collected in me and they are looking for the right opportunity to present themselves. This is my job now. I will move forward in trying to get the music out of me the way I want it to be. This is why I’m feeling the way I am right now. I don’t think I could have known that things would end up this way, but sometimes things happen for a reason.

I hope this is something that each one of you will realize one day–inside of you is the definition of who you are as a musician. It will be different than mine and anyone else–it is an amalgamation of sounds that have moved you in your life and your own experiences. If you don’t hear from me as much as before–if I am not creating new lessons or posting on this blog, you will know why. I am in a different state of mind right now. I will always be around to answer any questions you have and such. In the meantime, wish me the best.

Posted in Fresh baked thoughts | Leave a comment

A Way To Survive: Learn how to play chord changes on your steel guitar

Posted on April 6, 2011 by Mike Neer

A Way To Survive: No, I’m not talking about the classic Country song. I’m talking about surviving as a steel guitar player in a steel guitar hating world!

A lot of people have asked me to post something about playing back-up steel guitar and, while I tried to formulate a post describing the process, I realized one of the most important aspects of understanding how to do it: understanding the harmony and knowing how to play accompaniment within that harmonic structure. The art of playing counterpoint with a melody is something that involves a lot of attention and is beyond the scope of this blog–it is a very involved process that really has much to do with individual taste, not only of the player, but of the melody you are countering. Again, as in most other posts on this blog, these are my thoughts and opinions and they may or may not fall in with the popular opinion, but I really do believe that the steel guitar can be a great instrument in the context of many styles of music, many of which don’t currently embrace it. It is up to the players to elevate the level of playing to make it acceptable and even desirable in these other settings. At a time when it is difficult for many musicians to find work, it is often an instrument like the steel guitar that gets cut first, unfortunately. So, if we can find ways to make the instrument as complete as possible, it enhances its value in the context of a working band. Just some food for thought….

How many of you can play through the changes of a tune on lap steel as if you were accompanying on guitar or piano? This is not something I thought a lot about until I got involved with a group that needed reinforcement in that area. There were limitations on what I could do because of the nature of the tuning I used, but I understood very early on that I only needed to suggest harmonies for them to be apparent. This is where it is really helpful to know as much about functional harmony as you can. With music, as in many other things, not everything is as it appears (sounds). What you don’t know will hurt you. And I’m not going to lie to you: intonation is extremely crucial here! If your intonation needs work, the time to address that is now.

Today, when I look at the C6/A7, E13 or E9 tunings that I use, I see a world of possibilities harmonically. One of the most essential ingredients in a steel guitar tuning for me is a tritone interval–without it, you cannot have a pure dominant chord. As a refresher, a tritone interval is 3 whole tones or 6 semitones, or an augmented 4th or diminished 5th. It is the interval of dissonance. The most dissonant chords in diatonic harmony are the V, or dominant 7th, and vii, or half-diminished 7th. These have to resolve.

So, knowing that I can have a dom 7 chord expands my realm of possibilities considerably. A diminished triad is another essential for me. With C6/A7 I have that. Major and minor are also very nice and, if possible, I’d like to be able to find Maj7 or Maj9 chords. Augmented chords are most likely to be splintered, but that’s fine–if I can have a major 3rd interval, I can move it in whole steps to simulate the augmented sound. It really only takes 2 notes moving in whole steps or to define that sound.

The point is, if you know the essential ingredients of a chord and what you can leave out and still have that chord, then you will have a good understanding of how you can make a steel guitar work as a chordal instrument. Let me show you an example–I recorded the song “Deacon Blues” as an experiment. I laid down the chordal accompaniment on my Clinesmith lap steel. I listened to the song and wrote a chord chart, then I simply read down the chart using simple voicings. I know what I can leave out and what the important chord tones are and I think this track represents the song’s harmony pretty well. But that’s just a part of it. It is also really nice to use voicings where you can hear the inner voices moving, sort of like a choir. Large intervallic jumps are not necessarily a good thing. Have a listen to the intro, first verse and chorus:

Deacon Blues chordal accompaniment

Pretty cool, right? I noticed that on electric steel guitar I tend to play it more like an electric piano or organ when I accompany, whereas on an acoustic instrument I might be a little more guitaristic. One of the things I think is important about the Bebop Lap Steel book is the fact that I spent the time to include the chord voicings so you can play as an accompanist to yourself. That is what you should be doing! By accompanying yourself on steel guitar, you are not only expanding your knowledge of the instrument, but you are also strengthening elements of your playing such as your time feel (read my previous blog post about time feel). Just get out a recorder and lay down the chords to play along with. I’ve often thought of buying one of those Loop Station pedals for doing this. I know a few of the old-timers who don’t approve of the “guitarization” of the steel guitar and I understand that, but we live in a different musical world today. The whole idea is to enjoy yourself and become the best player you can be–nothing wrong with that. Tradition is important and fun, but moving forward is also important (and even more fun!)

Anyway, this is something that is really an important of my steel playing. I like to contribute to the music as much as I can–in the situations I am normally playing in, I am kind of making my own rules. If I was on the road with the Dixie Chicks or someone else, you can bet things would be different (which is also the reason why I’m not on the road with anyone else).

Happy chording!

Posted in Fresh baked thoughts, Lessons and Tips | 1 Comment

Groove is in the heart: strengthen your sense of time

Posted on April 4, 2011 by Mike Neer

One of the most overlooked elements of playing steel guitar is rhythm–it is something a lot of us take for granted, especially if we play other instruments. It is extremely difficult to master the art of the time feel on any instrument, but with the steel guitar it is extremely easy to play out of rhythm. There are so many factors involved in playing, particularly the controlling of the bar hand, that often the right hand gets less attention.

The thing about hearing a steel guitarist rushing the beat is that it really detracts from the performance. With the steel, you have to find that perfect balance of being relaxed AND on the beat when you’re out in front. If you are accompanying a vocalist, it’s best to really lay back and be careful not to push the beat. One of things you can always say about a top-notch steel player is that the time is usually impeccable.

If you feel like you are struggling to really find the groove and just sit perfectly where you need to be on the beat, there are several ways to work on this. First, I would suggest that you take an honest look at your right hand technique–is it sound, confident, not careless or haphazard? This is essential–it is definitely not a guessing game and we need to understand how to play things efficiently and cleanly. To do this, slow everything down. Use a metronome and set it at a slow pulse in the Largo range (40-60 bpm). Find the combinations of digits which give you the most confidence–if you are playing double stops, work on the combinations of thumb/index finger, thumb/middle finger, index/middle finger, paying close attention to your blocking. In some cases you will use pick blocking and in others, palm blocking. These should become regular exercises that you work on 10-20 minutes every day until you are comfortable. Again, the pulse is extremely important, so play quarter notes at the largo tempo, followed by eighth notes (you will have to subdivide the quarter note). Triplets are also extremely important to work into the routine, both quarter note triplets and eighth note triplets.

This kind of work will put you on the path to have a stronger connection with the beat and also help you to have enough confidence to relax and not push the beat. It is really important to be honest with ourselves when trying to do a self-evaluation of our playing. It’s really the only way that we can address the issues or shortcomings in our playing. But before we can do that, we have to learn how to recognize it. Listen to recordings of yourself playing time and, while I wouldn’t advise you to beat yourself up about it, embrace the opportunity to grow as a player.

And remember what Lady Miss Kier said: “Groove Is In The Heart!”

Posted in Lessons and Tips | Leave a comment

Sunshine and Rain

Posted on April 1, 2011 by Mike Neer

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here, but I’ve had so many things on my mind about the steel guitar that I just couldn’t get my thoughts focused enough to really find a way to say it. Sometimes it’s like that playing steel guitar, too–I get a lot of really good ideas and they all seem to happen at the same time. I really welcome those bursts of creative energy because it makes all of the senses come alive, almost like a sunny day. It’s hard to say what triggers it, but the real secret is recognizing it and taking full advantage of it. For the ideas you can’t get to right away, write them down in a notebook and save them for a rainy day.

So, it’s been a little more than 2 weeks since the Texas Steel Guitar Association Jamboree, and now I feel like it’s OK to talk about some of the things that I experienced/learned. I’d have to say one of the best things for me was the kindred spirit that seemed to exist everywhere–with novices, pros and even just enthusiasts. I’ve always enjoyed the company of musicians–they are my people! I have so many musician friends and it’s always a joy to be surrounded by them. With steel guitarists it’s a little different–you don’t come across too many jaded players because at the end of the day you’re still doing something that you had to be crazy about in the first place to ever consider learning! I know I was crazy to throw myself into it, but I don’t regret one moment of it. I say, “Let’s just celebrate the uniqueness of the steel guitar and put all our differences aside.”

So, getting back to the randomness of creativity: I have started working on a project/recording of songs as steel guitar duets. I will be accompanying myself on steel guitar (rhythm) and bass. I’m really excited about it, as I’ve got so many good ideas floating around upstairs. The songs will mostly be from the Rock songbook, including some Steely Dan, but it could take on any direction, as I am the producer, engineer, performer, etc. It’s going to take a while, but it’s going to be good.

I know what it’s like to be stuck in a rut and feel like I don’t have any direction, especially when it comes to playing steel. It’s like hitting a brick wall. I think those are what we could consider the “rainy days.” It’s OK, because these are the times when we can put those little ideas to work. Maybe you wanted to try to learn a song, or you wanted to see what it is like to play in this other tuning, or what have you. The point is to take away the focus from your rut and find a way out of it. I can guarantee that every player who has ever played an instrument has experienced this. It is nothing to be ashamed of. Actually, it just makes those sunny days seem all that much better. Seize the day!

Posted in Fresh baked thoughts | Leave a comment

I almost quit the steel guitar –a confession

Posted on March 1, 2011 by Mike Neer

Playing the steel guitar has never come easy to me, and I’m sure that’s also been the experience of many players who have picked it up later in life. When you’re young and starting to play an instrument, time is not the kind of prohibitive factor that it is when you become a responsible adult. I don’t know whether it exists only in the conscience, but there always seems to be something that blocks us from completely surrendering to the process. Maybe it’s guilt; maybe it’s the fact the we expect so much more from ourselves and that the slow progress is a disappointment.

As a child, time would absolutely fly by me and I wouldn’t have the slightest notion of it. I would become completely absorbed with the process of learning to play the guitar. Even when I could barely finger a D chord, I was fascinated by the instrument and wowed by the fact that people could actually make the kind of music they did with it. I thought, “If they can do it, so can I,” which is actually not a bad way of looking at things. Depending on the type of person you are and the level of commitment you are capable of, this attitude can take you a long way. The truth is: it was the only thing in my life that I’ve ever given that kind of commitment to. Even to this day, I am a person who enjoys many things in life: sports, cooking, running–but music is what I eat, sleep and breathe. Yes, I have a family–in fact, a fairly large one of my own–and necessity has caused me to alter my commitment to music, not abandon it. However, a few years ago, things were not quite so promising….

I’ve never shied away from challenging myself musically. I have not always succeeded: there were the aborted attempts at playing classical piano, cornet, recording engineering, straight ahead Jazz… I gave up on each of these things, but grew personally from my experiences with them–I just didn’t have the resolve to dedicate my life to them. When the idea of playing steel guitar crept into my mind, I didn’t realize exactly what kind of journey it would be, although I knew it would be challenging. I don’t think I quite understood just how much so. You see, as I might have mentioned elsewhere, my exposure to the instrument had been severely limited. I had never even seen a pedal steel guitar up close until about 15 years ago, when I was already in my 30s. Another thing is my musical restlessness–I believe in a personal musical evolution. It would kill me to think that I’d have to play the same music today that I played 25 years ago. In some ways it makes me grateful for my lack of success.

I’m going to skip through a lot of my earlier struggles with learning the instrument, as I’ve probably written about them in earlier posts. The electric steel guitar, including pedal steel, was very difficult for me to become acclimated with. I found myself just playing the gratuitous Rock slide guitar stuff without having any real concept of what the instrument was. After deciding to buy a National Tricone and joining the Moonlighters, I had at least given myself a purpose.

I want to take you to a moment, probably about 2007, when I finally decided that it was time for me to try to play the electric steel guitar again. I had friends like Rick Aiello always saying, “Man, I gotta get you to play electric.” I continued to play electric in the same tunings that I used with the Tricone (C#min7 and E) and became quickly bored with it. I then made a decision to get a double-neck steel and put C6, the tuning which I so rebelled against personally for numerous reasons–1. being that I didn’t get it, 2. being that I didn’t think it suited my darker musical nature–and what followed from that point might possibly be what is considered “rock bottom.” I struggled to play anything that sounded good to me. I did have gigs on steel, but when on the gigs I would shut down and go back into “default” mode. I hated it.

I remember talking to Todd Clinesmith and telling him that I was packing it in. I was serious about it. Todd said something along the lines of “let me know if there’s anything I can do.” I had sold most of my guitars by then, including my Rickenbacher Frying Pan, Clinesmith D-8, Tricones (2 of them) and several other great guitars. At that time, Todd started making single neck lap steels and I bought one from him. Not long after that I received a guitar that Mike Dotson of Maricopa Guitars built for me and Rick Aiello supplied the pickup–it was a re-creation of the original Rickenbacher Fry Pan prototype. Just gorgeous. Now, I’m not saying it was the equipment, because I don’t really believe in that kind of thing, but it was as if my commitment to the instrument had been reborn. I was THIS close to walking away from it.

I knew that the steel guitar was a completely different animal from the 6 string guitar. I believe that I had to abandon much of what I knew as a guitarist (I’m speaking of physical shapes and the approach to playing) and start all over on steel, taking with me only the knowledge of music that I’d accumulated. I listened to a ton of music, much of it given to me by friends with expansive collections, and started chipping away at the process of learning tunes. I learned tunes and forgot tunes on a daily basis–I never wrote anything down and much of it vanished into the ether of my brain. At one point I decided to start actually writing the stuff down, or transcribing it into notation with…gasp…tablature. This was the birth of Steelin’ From The Masters because I knew it was working for me. I’ve only really focused on the songs and licks that have caught my ears–usually they are the really challenging ones–but now that I am beginning to actually make music on the steel, it’s time for me stop and smell the roses and celebrate the beauty that the instrument is capable of.

I am so grateful to all of my friends and family, especially my wife, and Todd and Rick and all of my buddies, who have encouraged and supported me through the tough times. I want to thank you all from the bottom of my heart. And now I’m all verklempt….

Posted in Fresh baked thoughts | 2 Comments

Block chord solo: “All The Things You Are”

Posted on February 28, 2011 by Mike Neer

I’m going to share with you part of my arrangement of my favorite standard, the wonderful “All The Things You Are”–a tune that one never stops learning. This arrangement follows along the block chord type playing that I have been talking about. In case you are not familiar with the term “block chord”, it simply refers to a piano style pioneered and perfected by such players as George Shearing, Red Garland and Milt Buckner. It involves playing the melody note on top and harmonizing chords underneath it. Several of the great piano players could play as many as 10 notes in their block chords. For our purposes here, we will generally stick with 3 and 4.

I have included the original chord changes, but what I am playing in many cases is not that chord at all, but a substitution which enables me to enhance the melody notes with extended and altered harmonies. In some case, such as in bar 3, I use tritone substitution for the entire ii7-V7 cadence–in the case of Bbmin7 – Eb7, I substituted Emin7 and A7, which are the tritone substitutes. This enabled me to get the desired melody notes and add some interesting bass line movement. This particular device was commonly used by Wes Montgomery.

I hope you find the time to play through this arrangement. This is basically the way I would begin playing the tune and I would strive to go even a little further with changes to the rhythm and harmony. These are very personal stylistic choices. I am also introducing here for the first time a tuning which I use frequently, but don’t have a name for, other than C6/A7 with an alteration. The 8th string is tuned to F. Warning: This tuning requires very careful blocking, especially with regard to string 6 (C#).

Here is a quick audio file: All The Things You Are

attya pg1
attya pg2

Posted in Fresh baked thoughts, Lessons and Tips | Tagged all the things you are, block chords, chord melody, george shearing, mike neer, milt buckner | Leave a comment

Conversation with Henry Bogdan, Part 1

Intervallically Speaking: Fun with “Tenths”

New book in the works and other news….

Talking Steel Guitar with Joel Paterson, Part 2

Talking Steel Guitar with Joel Paterson, Part 1

Conversation with Lee Jeffriess, Part 4

Conversation with Lee Jeffriess, Part 3

Conversation with Lee Jeffriess, Part 2

Conversation with Lee Jeffriess, Part 1

Some exciting new things for Lap Steelin’

The shape of lap steel guitar music to come

More on the subtle nuances of style

The subtle nuances of style

C6 tuning is perfect for “breadboarding”

Things happen for a reason….

A Way To Survive: Learn how to play chord changes on your steel guitar

Groove is in the heart: strengthen your sense of time

Sunshine and Rain

I almost quit the steel guitar –a confession

Block chord solo: “All The Things You Are”

Subscribe

Categories

Archives

Links

Recent Posts

Subscribe

Categories

Archives

Links

Recent Posts

Tags