What Is a Pedal Steel Guitar? | Pedal Steel Guitar

- - Must Haves for any Guitar Player: This is a Pedal Steel guitar and why&it called a Pedal Steel guitar? Well, first of all, it¬ a Steel Pedal guitar. The pedals are not made of steel. Originally, steel guitars were simply what you see at the top here, with nothing else. Just a neck, tuning pegs, a pick-up, some strings. The simplest possible iteration of an instrument really, and it was played with a tone bar, usually a fairly heavy piece of stainless steel, sometimes a jackknife or bottle, whatever was handy. And you would play it in open tuning, and it was popular in the 20&especially in Hawaiian music and that type of thing. There were limits to what you could do with this however, because if it was in just one tuning, and you had only six or eight strings, they didn&even have ten strings so much in those days. You ran out of keys that you could play in. The Pedal Steel guitar came along when people wanted to try to get more flexibility out of the steel guitar set-up. Hence, the pedals. You&see these rods coming down here connecting to pedals down here. And what happens is that the pedals, the energy you put into pressing the pedals down, are also applying pressure to the knee levers here. I don&know if you can see them on either side. These raise and lower the strings by pre-set intervals. So, a quick look at the guitar. You&got the tuning pegs, as you would with the guitar. This is the nut here, and if you can see, these are little rollers...