any of you guys play lap steel?

[braaandooon]

I have absolutely no advice on playing lapsteel. I remember seeing Dredg a long time ago, and Gavin Hayes ran a lap steel into an ibanez de7, shit sounded good. The intro to "bug eyes" always sounded nice and haunting.

[The_Active_Conundrum]

I have a lapsteel I use sometimes. the pickup is total garbage. I have it tuned to open D minor. I tried a couple tunings, but Dm is what made music come out.

[gordian knot]

I don't know anything about it at all, but I love the sound. Where did you start? What do you play? idk:

I've tried some pedal steel, sprt pf a more complicated lap steel in a way. It was pretty difficult beautiful but very difficult.
but I did start w/o using pedals - so it was sorta similar.

do you play regular slide?

[popvulture]

I play lap and pedal steel – I'd definitely recommend messing with the former if you're just looking for something fun/new to explore without too much headache.

Aside from just being fun, another really awesome thing about lap steel is that you can still find some pretty fucking great vintage models without breaking the bank. I bought my 1950 National Chicagoan on eBay for about 300 bucks, and all I had to do to get in pretty top working order was restring it, spray the pots and get a 1/4" to phenolic cable made (which I preferred over changing the original jack on the guitar).

Obv they sound amazing through effects—to my ears, the more psychy/dreamy the better. Different bars and odder, more textured type of slide implements are fun to fuck around with too. For standard bars, I personally like BJS (bjsbars.com, not sure what his current state of production is). A volume pedal is pretty much a must, which is a whole other topic that people seem to be able to wig out about endlessly. I've liked playing some of the newer Goodrich models, but I mainly use one of the fat old Sho-Buds. Good luck!

[friendship]

Necro thread! With lots of guidance from Chanks, I eventually acquired an Electromuse from the 40s for stupid cheap. For a couple months I was using a regular glass slide, but then bought a Schubb bar, the weight of which really helped. I'm still a novice on it, but it's so much fun and such a great texture. I've been adding it to some recordings I'm working on with friend.

I also find it responds well to effects, more so than I expected. I like adding subtle, slow pre-dirt modulation. I also like running it through big ass stereo effects for a really spacey sound. It eats hedonistic quantities of compression and soft clipping for breakfast too.

Super glad I got one.

[Chankgeez]

Necro thread!

I thought it deserved it. That lap steel in the eBay listing I necrobumped with seems pretty nice.

[popvulture]

Ha, I didn't notice the original post date...

[Chankgeez]

That's alright, you still gave good advice.

[friendship]

Agreed! Excellent advice regardless (I hadn't considered textured slides). And that Recording King is hoooot.

[bugzaney]

any recommendations on an affordable beginner lap steel?

[Chankgeez]

Yeah, bid on the one I posted on the last page.

(What do you think you're looking for, bugzaney?)

You can usually find nice vintage lap steels for less than $350 or so if you look.

[popvulture]

Yeah it's great to mess around with all kinds of weird stuff beyond the standard bar. I remember seeing that Nels Cline does a lot of that stuff—he's got a whole collection of cool things like springs and random other textured objects to drag across the strings. A tip in that department: put heavy strings on the steel. They hold up better to gnarlier materials, plus they just sound better. I think I have 13s on mine.

As for beginner lap steels, I don't really know much about companies that make new ones... to my knowledge, there's not a lap steel equivalent of the Carter Starter (a beginner pedal steel that's pretty decent).

BUT... the great thing is that you can get vintage ones for pretty cheap, so why not get one of those? It's really one of the last great untapped vintage markets, I guess just because they're not super popular. For 300 bucks, you can get something really awesome with just a little digging around.

Also, for anyone who ever gets into steels and wants to dig a little deeper, steelguitarforum.com is a great resource. There are guys on there who machine parts, etc that are otherwise unavailable... pretty damn dedicated people.

[Chankgeez]

This lady plays:

[Dandolin]

I heard tell^^^

[Chankgeez]

… and look, she even got a steel guit to match the color of my new avatar.