What the heck is a pedal steel guitar anyway?

Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat: I’m not really a pedal steel player. There are days when I can pull off a passable imitation of a proficient guitar player, but when it comes to the steel, I’m merely a dabbler.

What surprises me most frequently, however, is how few people even know what a pedal steel is, although almost everyone is guaranteed to have a heard one before.

So, here’s my little primer on the beast itself, as told by a perfect amateur…

First, a love story:

Growing up, I didn’t really listen to much music. My parents had a few classical records and we’d listen to CBC in the car, but mostly to news and magazine type shows. Sometimes they’d break out a tape of golden oldies, the kind offered by Time-Life, but there wasn’t much popular music outside of that. When I did finally get into rock and roll as a teenage, I was influenced heavily by a lot of my punk friends—the pedal steel was the sound of country music and country music was the sound of small-minded rednecks.

But after leaving home at 18 to go to school in Calgary, and struggling with that coming-of-age sense of identity as most young people probably do, I was surprised to find myself drawn back more and more to country music. Its themes and sounds began to make more sense to me and suddenly the pedal steel, though still sounding like rednecks, at least sounded like rednecks with broken hearts from a place I’d finally accepted calling home.

The record that pushed me over the edge was the Wilco/Billy Bragg album Mermaid Avenue, a collection of Woody Guthrie songs unearthed by his daughter and set to new music. Among them was “One By One”, a fine song with Bob Egan’s yearning steel part (although Bob left Wilco shortly after this record was made, he was recruited into Blue Rodeo shortly after). The short instrumental breakdown (around 2:25) doesn’t really amount to a solo, but it drew me to the steel guitar like nothing had to date.

I’ve always loved to ethereal sounds and a great pedal steel player can manipulate notes like water—looking back, I’m surprised I didn’t take to it sooner. Around the time I finished my degree I finally took the plunge and bought one of my own.

So, how does it work?

Although the pedal steel uses similar strings, tuning machines and pick-ups as a regular electric guitar and is generally the same scale, the similarities end there. Steels have a neck, but its function isn’t to fret the string (indeed, there are no frets). Rather, the player uses a heavy chrome slide called a “steel” or “tone bar” to change the pitch of the strings. The steel doesn’t need to transfer any of the string’s energy to the body the way a regular guitar does, resulting in an increase in sustain especially when combined with the vibrato imparted by the tone bar.

Then there’re the pedals. Originally developed by steel players to change the tuning of the strings between songs, they soon began to be used to bend strings as part of the performance. These smooth string bends have become the quintessential pedal steel sound. Furthermore, because the steel player can manipulate the notes with the pedals as well as the tone bar the instrument is capable of sustaining certain notes while resolving others—a feat much more difficult to accomplish on a regular guitar. Most professional steel players have their own combinations of foot and knee levers (known as copedants) custom installed into their instruments.

Finally, most players use a volume pedal to control the attack of the notes, allowing them to perform violin-like swells or fade up dying notes to increase their sustain. The overall performance takes a degree of coordination between hands, fingers, feet and knees. I believe it’s this extra effort that makes guitar players find the steel so challenging but end result is worth it.