The pedal steel guitar bends chords with feet and knees while notes ring
In 1954 Bud Isaacs pressed a pedal mid-chord on Webb Pierce's Slowly, shifting some notes while others kept sounding. It was the first Billboard number one country hit to feature pedal steel, and that swooping harmonic move sent lap steel players rushing to buy pedal-equipped instruments. The sound went on to define country music.
The instrument lies flat on a frame and has no hollow body; an electric pickup feeds an amplifier. The player plucks with picks on the right thumb and two fingers while the left hand glides a polished steel bar along fretless strings, which lets notes slide and waver like a singing voice. A typical modern E9 model carries ten strings, with three pedals for the feet and five levers worked by the knees. Underneath, rods run from each pedal to changer fingers at the end of the guitar, which rotate slightly to tighten or slacken chosen strings by a semitone or whole tone, then spring back when released. A small compartment of nylon tuning rods lets players correct chords that sound fine open but drift when a pedal goes down.
A separate volume pedal under the right foot is vital to the style. Players swell the level after each pluck, hiding the attack and stretching the sustain so a note seems to enter like a violin section.
The story starts with the acoustic Hawaiian lap guitar and louder resonator models, then electric pickups in the early 1930s. By the late 1940s players were frustrated that fixed tunings made many chords all but impossible. They tried slanting the bar, adding strings and piling two, three or even four differently tuned necks onto one console, as Noel Boggs and Leon McAuliffe did, but such rigs were heavy and costly.
Early pedal designs retuned every string at once. Bandleader Alvino Rey worked with machinist John Moore in 1939, and Gibson launched the result as the Electraharp in 1940, selling only 43 before production stopped, possibly because of the war. The breakthrough came from Paul Bigsby, a former pattern maker and motorcycle engineer in southern California, whose pedal mechanism of the late 1940s helped set the pattern. Buddy Emmons, Jimmy Day and others refined it, and the instrument later found homes in jazz, rock, pop and Sacred Steel.
Source: Pedal steel guitar
