D6th Chromatic Demo Recordings

Over the past few months, I’ve developed a new steel guitar copedent and applied it to a Desert Rose “Vintage Pro” S-10 steel guitar. It’s a D6th tuning, but the top 2 strings are like the E9th. It includes the standard pedals from both the E9th and C6th tuning of a double-neck pedal steel. I’ve…

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Steel Guitar Music Visualizations

I’ve been making videos of my previously recorded steel guitar music. You can browse the entire collection at https://vimeo.com/showcase/9009700. Visit our online Steel Guitar Shopper store for strings, equipment, music, instructional videos and materials, hard to find reference materials and rare items. https://www.steelguitarshopper.com/

Visit our online Steel Guitar Shopper store for strings, equipment, music, instructional videos and materials, hard to find reference materials and rare items. https://www.steelguitarshopper.com/

Thoughts about tuning

(Originally posted on The Steel Guitar Forum discussion, copied to here.) Electronic tuners didn’t exist in the 60s. Everyone tuned by ear. The better your ear, the more in tune you were. Before I got an electronic tuner in the mid-70s, I tuned by ear using harmonics. That is what we refer to as “just…

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Extending D9th Range to Low E

Tuning down a step to D9th will give you more low end, but it doesn’t go as low as a standard 6-string guitar. Here’s what the “almost standard” E9th 3+5 changes look like dropped to D. If you add the “Franklin” pedal, you’ll have a G on the 10th string. That’s close, but no cigar….

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D/G for 6-string Pedal Steel

I really love playing my little 6-string Rickenbacker in D/G tuning. So I got to thinking, how would I set up that tuning on a 6-string pedal guitar? The copedent I came up with requires a tunable split. Without split capabilities the F# to F change would have to be pedal 4. It’s the C6th P6…

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D6th Hybrid S-10 4+4 Concept

For a decade now I’ve been playing all styles of music on a D6th pedal steel. My current and probably final copedent has 6 pedals and 6 knee levers (click here for details). That’s an unusual configuration, though – most 10-string pedal steels don’t have more than 4 pedals, and most players don’t need more…

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Pedal Steel Slide Rule

As I was learning about the space where pedal steel and music theory intersect, I made a slide rule out of card stock to help me understand. My dream was to have it manufactured and sell it to other steel guitarists. That never happened. 50 years later, I found the prototype in an old box…

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Tuning a 70’s Pull-Release Marlen

With its one-piece fingers, the pull-release changer is the simplest of all pedal steel change mechanisms. Initially, raising or lowering a string seemed to be enough, but players saw potential in more complex copedent ideas. By the mid 70’s, the idea of both raising and lowering each string had gained traction, particularly on the E…

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The Beatles Study Group

As part of its Music Workshop series, the Cloverdale Arts Alliance will host a monthly event dedicated to the music of the world’s most celebrated pop group, The Beatles. These events will be directed by Bob Lee, a retired local musician and self-proclaimed Beatlemaniac. Each month we will “deconstruct” two Beatles songs, learning the history…

Visit our online Steel Guitar Shopper store for strings, equipment, music, instructional videos and materials, hard to find reference materials and rare items. https://www.steelguitarshopper.com/

A new look for this web site.

I’ve installed a new, cleaner-looking WordPress theme that works better on mobile phones and tablets. Some of the older pages under “Articles” and “Copedents” aren’t in the WordPress system, though. You’ll still need a large screen to view them properly. Visit our online Steel Guitar Shopper store for strings, equipment, music, instructional videos and materials,…

Visit our online Steel Guitar Shopper store for strings, equipment, music, instructional videos and materials, hard to find reference materials and rare items. https://www.steelguitarshopper.com/

Laughing Gravy: Gram Parsons and Beyond!

Friday, October 26th 7:30 PM at Occidental Center for the Arts Sonoma County’s Laughing Gravy is back! with ‘An Evening of Cosmic American Music’. This popular band of super-accomplished American roots musicians has been paying musical tribute to country-rock icon Gram Parsons since 2003, when LG was founded by radio personality, producer and musician (and record store…

Visit our online Steel Guitar Shopper store for strings, equipment, music, instructional videos and materials, hard to find reference materials and rare items. https://www.steelguitarshopper.com/

Quick and Easy E9th Tempered Tuning

This sweetened tuning is not JI, ET, or meantone. It’s sort of in between. It sounds good to me, and it has the advantage that all of the cents numbers are 5 cent lines on the tuning meter. I’ve been using it for many years. Since it’s in between the the two “accepted” tuning standards,…

Visit our online Steel Guitar Shopper store for strings, equipment, music, instructional videos and materials, hard to find reference materials and rare items. https://www.steelguitarshopper.com/

D6th Hybrid on S-10, 4 pedals, 5 levers

On The Steel Guitar Forum, Adam Tracksler asked about my hybrid D6th copedent: What would you use if you had 5 levers and 4 pedals? Which pedal and knee would you leave out? It’s an interesting question. I’d probably do a S-10 4+5 hybrid D6th like this: LKL LKV LKR P1 P2 P3 P4 RKL…

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Wine Country Swing with Cori Wood

These songs were recorded at a private concert on April 21, 2018. My 2017 Sierra S-10 pedal steel is way too loud in the mix because of microphone placement, but it does serve to demonstrate the swing side of the Hybrid D6th copedent and the excellent tone of this instrument. The amp is a Milkman…

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Playing with The Rhythm Rangers

Fly on the wall recorder (Zoom H2) at Redwood Cafe, Cotati CA, 4/20/2018. I’m playing the new Sierra S-10 pedal steel built by Ross Shafer and tuned to D6th. I also used some effects pedals – the “organ” sound on “The Weight” is actually pedal steel through an Electro Harmonix POG2 and a Stymon Lex….

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Now Supporting Secure https

This site (b0b.com) now supports the Secure Socket Layer protocol. You may see a padlock on your address bar, and notice that it is https instead of the old http. This is good! Some of the pages don’t have the padlock because of “mixed content”. This is usually because of images that were coded in…

Visit our online Steel Guitar Shopper store for strings, equipment, music, instructional videos and materials, hard to find reference materials and rare items. https://www.steelguitarshopper.com/

Moved to a New Server

This web site (b0b.com) has been moved to a new server on the DigitalOcean platform. My Bohlen-Pierce site (bp.b0b.com) was also moved. The new server uses Nginx instead of Apache webserver software, and has a solid state disk (SSD) instead of a traditional hard disk. I’m pleased with the snappy performance. The plan is to…

Visit our online Steel Guitar Shopper store for strings, equipment, music, instructional videos and materials, hard to find reference materials and rare items. https://www.steelguitarshopper.com/

Meantone on the Peterson StroboPlus HD

My trusted Korg AT-120 tuner bit the dust, so I bought a new Peterson StroboPlus HD. It was pretty confusing at first – I had to read the manual to make any sense of it. I play a D6th copedent tuned to meantone. My tuning numbers walk around the circle of fifths like this:  …

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Circle of 5ths on C6th

Here’s an interesting way to get around the circle of 5ths using 7th chords on the C6th tuning. You need to have a lever that raises your C’s to C#, and another that raises your A’s to Bb.  Visit our online Steel Guitar Shopper store for strings, equipment, music, instructional videos and materials, hard to…

Visit our online Steel Guitar Shopper store for strings, equipment, music, instructional videos and materials, hard to find reference materials and rare items. https://www.steelguitarshopper.com/

What’s an 11th Chord?

The spelling for an 11th chord is this: 1 3 5 b7 9 11 So a C11 is: C E G Bb D F Look familiar?  It should.  Bb D F is a Bb major chord. Look at this D11:  D F# A C E G.  Whoa, it has a C chord on top! An…

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Sho~Bud Crossover Copedent

Here’s how the original Sho-Bud crossover guitars were set up. They had 6 pedals and 1 knee lever, and a mechanical lever that switched everything from one neck to the other. A cool idea, but the implementation was sort of clunky. Visit our online Steel Guitar Shopper store for strings, equipment, music, instructional videos and…

Visit our online Steel Guitar Shopper store for strings, equipment, music, instructional videos and materials, hard to find reference materials and rare items. https://www.steelguitarshopper.com/

A Blast From the Past

from The Pedal Press, February 1979, Page 3 —- Whither the Future? What happened to all those steel guitar fans of yesteryear? One old fellow told me that he quit following steel guitar when pedals came in because that’s when they quit playing the melody. “How can you call it music without the melody?”, he…

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Another Thing We Lost When We Lost Vinyl

Listening to LPs lately, I’ve come to realize that one side of a record is just about all I want to hear of an artist in one sitting. Full CD albums are too long. I like the format of 20 minutes by one artist, then go to the next LP. A side of an LP…

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I Love Steel Guitars

I have a bit of GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome). Not too bad – I do sell stuff now and then, mostly to buy other stuff. Most of all, I love the way that every piece of gear is a piece of musical history. I’m jealous of guitar builders and amp builders, to the point where…

Visit our online Steel Guitar Shopper store for strings, equipment, music, instructional videos and materials, hard to find reference materials and rare items. https://www.steelguitarshopper.com/

Electronic Changer Controller

Some years ago, I envisioned a hardware interface to an electronically controlled pedal steel changer. The pedals and knee levers on the guitar would be wired to a computer instead of pulling the changer directly.  The computer controller would allow the player to instantly change tunings and copedents.  I couldn’t find a manufacturer who was…

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New Album – Stella

I’ve never been much of a folkie, but that changed when I found Stella, a Harmony acoustic guitar from the 1960’s. It hurt my fingers at first, so I added an extension nut and started playing with a bar of steel. Suddenly I was in love with the soft, woody tones of this old acoustic…

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Musical Modes That We Actually Use

The subject of musical modes is pretty intimidating. The idea is that since there are 7 notes in the scale, any one of them could be the first note of a different kind of scale. To make it worse, someone gave each of these scales a hard-to-remember Greek name. Apparently you’re not a “real musician”…

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Relative Minor Of A Minor Chord – Say What?

Most of us are familiar with the concept of relative minors, and how they relate to 6th chords. The 6th chords contain the same notes as the m7 chords, but the bass player uses a different note as the root. C6 = Am7 D6 = Bm7 F6 = Dm7 G6 = Em7 A6 = F#m7…

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Have You Seen This Girl?

She just loves the sound of that steel guitar. Visit our online Steel Guitar Shopper store for strings, equipment, music, instructional videos and materials, hard to find reference materials and rare items. https://www.steelguitarshopper.com/

Visit our online Steel Guitar Shopper store for strings, equipment, music, instructional videos and materials, hard to find reference materials and rare items. https://www.steelguitarshopper.com/

Blank Copedent Charts

Someone might find these useful. Blank Copedent Charts.pdf (printable PDF file) Blank Copedent Charts.ods (OpenOffice Spreadsheet) Blank Copedent Charts.xls (Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet) Visit our online Steel Guitar Shopper store for strings, equipment, music, instructional videos and materials, hard to find reference materials and rare items. https://www.steelguitarshopper.com/

Visit our online Steel Guitar Shopper store for strings, equipment, music, instructional videos and materials, hard to find reference materials and rare items. https://www.steelguitarshopper.com/

Electro Harmonix POG2 Settings

These presets were developed with my Desert Rose pedal steel tuned to D6/G, a compromise tuning that is lower than E9th but higher than C6th. I ran the guitar through a passive Goodrich volume pedal, into the POG2, and then into a clean tube amp (Mesa/Boogie Maverick). I also tested the organ presets with an…

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Bohlen-Pierce scale

unrelated to pedal steel guitar (so far as I know) reference: www.transpectra.org The Bohlen-Pierce (BP) scale  is an alternative musical scale arrived at by dividing the harmonic twelfth (a 3:1 frequency ratio) into thirteen steps. The result is an unusual sequence of tones providing many consonant intervals and hence the promise of extensive musical possibilities to…

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