hillbilly45 says:
4/1/2014 1:45:03 AM
Hi, every cloud has a silver lining. Arthritis and a neuromuscular condition made it increasingly difficult for me to fret a guitar in the conventional way, so I took up slide playing. Am still very much a novice and have to tape the bar to my finger otherwise I tend to drop it. Working my way through the Bob Brozman instructional material and have recently bought the Mary Flower DVD.
Am still dependent on tabs and am trying to figure out how to convert standard guitar tab into open d for slide playing. Any thoughts on this would be welcome
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 | Liz Williams says:
4/1/2014 8:03:41 AM
There are quite a few of us who took up steel guitar after an injury or medical condition. I have focal dystonia in my fretting hand. If you haven't yet joined the steel guitar forum, I recommend it. There is a wealth of knowledge on this site and the steel guitar forum about adapting bars with velcro straps, using a hollow slide as a steel and many other ingenious solutions to help with gripping. If you start a thread, I think you'll find people willing to adapt a bar for you.
I can't recommend converting standard tuning tab to open D. I found that approach too frustrating. I hope others chime in here with their thoughts about this. I've found picking out melodies and harmonizing them with 1 or 2 other notes a more successful approach, as well as finding runs and melody fragments in and out of the straight bar chord positions. For me, the hardest part about switching from standard guitar to steel is learning think and hear music like a steeler. Letting go of full chords in favor of just the right 1, 2 or 3 notes is a mental challenge! The silver lining here is I'm taking in much more live music than I used to, and spending time on youtube listening, analyzing and copying. It reminds me of when I first started playing guitar as a teenager: That was all I did!
I got the Mary Flower DVD too, but haven't had time to get into it yet. I love her playing - great rhythm, clean and tasty.
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 | Bob Blair says:
4/2/2014 8:27:57 PM
In an interview I once heard Arlo Guthrie say that as a kid he would not practice piano, so eventually the deal he had with his mother was that he had to sit at the piano for a half hour a day even if he didn't practice like he was supposed to be doing. So to, in his words, "piss her off" he would sit there at the piano playing the guitar. And while doing that he made the discovery that they had the same notes, which of course got him going seriously on the piano, which he has played very well through his whole career, though he is a great guitar player also. As obvious as that is, its a lesson that I think we all need to take to heart in terms of our various instruments.
I find that often I'll play the same thing on lead guitar or dobro as I would have played on pedal steel - (maybe now I think like a steel player too much), but I always think about what Arlo said. I guess one thing I don't like about tablature is it makes me think too much about the mechanics of the instrument (and the mechanics of the body parts that are manipulating it) and not enough about the notes.
Although I used some tablature when learning to play pedal steel (all of the methods that were available used it) , I've never been that big a fan. I much prefer real notation, but I lost what little sight reading ability I had somewhere back down the road - I can read a bit on regular guitar but I get a nosebleed after the second ledger line. Like Liz says, you need to think about playing melodies and learn to play them as you hear them in your head.
Getting to the point where you can pick out melodies can be a tough transition to make at first but it is far more achievable than you might think. There's a reason the old music methods - for guitar, recorder and whatever - had the students playing simple single note melodies. The discipline involved in cutting back what you are playing to the basic melody, whether it's Yankee Doodle or a dumbed down Beethoven's 9th (what are some other ones - American Patrol, La Cucaracha, "A Policeman's Lot is not a Happyy Lot"…..a whole bunch of them, all of which were great tunes for beginners to learn on and which as melodies are fun to play at any level), will take you to a point where you can hear the intervals and start playing whatever simple tune is in your head (and a lot of great tunes are relatively simple if you just concentrate on playing the melody). I still use some of the tunes from my first guitar methods as practice exercises on pedal steel and dobro, and on D tuned Weissenborn. All these years later I still remember tunes from my guitar and recorder methods and from junior high school band - I'll play those old songs, even the marches, on whatever instrument I have in my hands. These days though the first part of most of my practice session on any instrument is playing whatever tune was in my head, and then as I get confident with the melody dressing up the arrangement a bit. Choose some tunes, play them in the key of D, and in that tuning the harmonies will be easy to find. If every day you pick out a different melody in no time you will be able to pick up your instrument and play a melody without hesitation. Learn Yankee Doodle and Ode to Joy and a few of those first if that's what you have to do to get yourself started. If you are singing a song in the shower, when you get out sit down and play the tune you were singing.
The other thing about just playing simple one line melodies is that it really lets you hear the tone you are getting and makes you work on making each note sound better.
And like Liz says, there are quite a few people around who have struggled with adapting a tone bar to compensate for their inability to grip it - the steel guitar forum is a great place to ask the question.
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| Liz Williams says:
5/12/2014 5:52:10 PM
Yeah, that was a great post from Bob. I got so busy implementing it, I forgot to respond to it.
I'm classically trained, and new to improvising and noodling. I've been surprised by how quickly picking out melodies has connected my ears and my hands. And I've been amazed at how much fun it is to harmonize the melodies and noodle around. I've been doing this more on ukulele and dobro than Weissenborn. On dobro, I've found Jimmy Heffernan's "Scales and How to Use Them" lesson invaluable. I'm hoping his approach to scales will transfer to the Weissenborn after I get it embedded in my hands and ears.
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