4Zale

There’s old country. There’s new country. Then there are the Dixie Chicks.

Natalie Maines, Martie Seidel and Emily Robison have taken the Texas-bred sound of a fiddle, banjo, dobro and crystal-clear vocal harmonies into whole new territory. They are the rare act that comes along a few times in a generation that is destined to shake things up, rewrite the rules and become the new musical trendsetters.

The public has certainly noticed. The Dixie Chicks’ first Monument album Wide Open Spaces has become the biggest selling album ever by a country duo or group - racking up some 6 million sales by the time their second album, Fly, was completed. The tremendous sales only demonstrates that while the Dixie Chicks have established themselves as a true country music act, they have also won over audiences outside the country genre. In a music field routinely known for selling to the conservative 30 and over crowd, more than 60% of the Dixie Chicks sales have been to consumers under the age of 25. Their concert audience is as likely to be comprised of entire rows of young women in their early teens and twenties as it is to include middle age couples and entire families complete with pre-teen girls dressed like their musical idols and singing every Dixie Chicks’ song word for word.

The press has certainly noticed. Publications from Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly and People to Harper’s Bazaar, In Style, Seventeen and TV Guide have documented how the Dixie Chicks are bending the music world to their will and making country music more ‘hip’ than ever. With the wrap-up of 1998, numerous national publications named them the “Breakout Act of the Year” and recognized Wide Open Spaces as one of the “Best Of” albums of the year. USA Today credited the Chicks with single-handedly returning the banjo to country radio and Rolling Stone summed it up when they called them “the badass queenpins of country.” At a time when much of the press on country music has lamented the ’sameness’ of the sound and the artists, no less than the Los Angeles Times conceded that “the Dixie Chicks are the perfect antidote.”

The music industry has certainly noticed. The Dixie Chicks’ fellow musicians and industry peers, in particular, have overwhelmingly acknowledged their contribution. In a year’s time, they have been honored with two Grammy Awards (Best Country Album and Best Country Vocal Performance Duo/Group), two Country Music Association Awards (Group of the Year and the Horizon Award), plus three Academy of Country Music Awards (including Album of the Year), one American Music Award and two TNN Music Awards. On Nashville’s Music Row, where the unspoken business strategy often seems to be “if we can make it work once, we can beat it to death,” the music industry has obviously been taking notes. It’s likely not a coincidence that almost every record label in Nashville has signed a female trio since the Dixie Chicks exploded on to the scene. But clearly what makes this act work is not just that they are a female trio. The difference is this: There simply is no other act in any musical format that sounds like the Dixie Chicks

Sometimes it might seem that there are as many ways of tuning a pedal steel as there are pedal steel players. But if you strip the personal touches and enhancements from the guitars of the most players, you’ll find a common denominator of 3 pedals and 3 knee levers. In most instructional material, the pedals are called A, B and C, and the knee levers are called D, E and F.

This basic arrangement provides multiple inversions of all of the major and minor chords, all of the fundamental country and blues licks, and a healthy assortment of jazz chords. I’ve been playing for over 20 years, and I’m sure that there are a lot of positions and licks in the basic 3+3 setup that I still don’t know.

Most steel players don’t strum chords, but they understand where the notes of the chord can be found on their instrument. The close intervals in the tuning make it necessary to skip strings to get the simple triad harmonies. For example, the open position includes all the notes of an E major chord on strings 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, and 10.

A long time ago, steel players used pedals to simply change tunings. They would play a passage in an E tuning, for example, and then press the pedals to play the next passage in an A tuning. This technique is still useful in blues and old-timey music, where a more primitive sound is desired.

Modern pedal steel playing includes the use of pedals while the strings are sounding and the bar is in motion. For example, the modern player player may pick strings in the I (no pedals) position, then slide up three frets, activating the VI (pedal A + knee F) position during the slide for a smooth transition up to the next inversion of the triad.

Another modern steel technique involves playing complete melodies using pedals instead of moving the bar. If you look carefully at the tuning chart, you can see that almost two full octaves of the E major and A major scales are available at the nut of the guitar. These scales are of course movable up the neck with the bar. The scale “licks” available using pedals at the I and IV positions are a large part of the modern country sound.

I hope this little article has served to demystify the E9th tuning a bit. It’s intimidating at first - all those strings, all those pedals and levers - but the theory behind it is really fairly simple. Where a guitarist uses fingers to play notes on different frets, the steel player uses pedals to bring those notes to the barred fret.

As with any instrument, there’s the familiar routine: learn your scales, learn your chords, Practice! If you’re a good guitarist, chances are you could be a good steel player. It’s easier than it looks, and steel players are always in greater demand than lead guitarists. A word of caution, though - once you start making “that sound”, you may never look back. This may just be the world’s most pleasurable addiction…

I’d like to share my thoughts about steel guitars and string changing. I’ve found over the years that If you play your guitar (It doesn’t matter what brand) 1 hour a day you should change your strings between 10 to 14 days. If you play more often than that you should change every week. If you didn’t play a note on your guitar for three weeks you’d still need to change them. Just tuning to 440 and doing nothing stretches the life and flexibility out of the strings after a few weeks.

Professional Guitarists all over the world will agree that the most they can hope for is a weeks worth of use, out of a set of strings, because of the bends they make. This pales in comparison to the bending and constant stretching that pedal steels do. If you are breaking strings or having tuning problems, chances are you’re not changing often enough.

I know that it is expensive so if you can’t afford to change as often as you need, try changing the plain gauges each week & the wound strings every two weeks. Changing strings compares to changing the oil in your car. You wouldn’t go 15000 miles per change and expect your engine to sound and perform right. Steel guitars are machines as well as a music producing source.

I know all the cliche’s, “you don’t like the sound of new strings” or “I don’t change them until they break”! Modern manufactured steels have become state of the art. Strings are still being made the way they were 40 yrs. ago. They can’t take the constant stretching from the pedals over a long period, and still keep their sustain and tuning. When I lived in Detroit I kept strings on forever until they either broke or started to have that awful zinging sound. I’ve been there…done that.

In the studio I change every 3 to 7 days. Guitarists change generally every day. Acoustic guitarists change for every 3 hr session. Sometimes they get a good set that lasts all day. That’s how important strings are to the tuning and tonality of the instruments you hear on records.

It’s important to have a well tuned instrument. I’ve seen all the posts about “How we should tune” but nothing about the strings that we are trying to tune.

Here are the gauges I recommend for the E9th:

F#—-013 Eb—-015 G#—-011 or 012 E—–014 B—–018 or 017 G#—-020 or 021 plain (I don’t know of anyone in Nashville using a wound string here. If there is he would be the exception to the rule!) F#—-024 or 026 Wound E—–030 D—–034 B—–036 or 038

Any combination of these gauges have all been tried by the pro’s and proven to be equally balanced for the best tone possible.

The pedal steel guitar tunings currently in common use hinder the acceptance of the instrument in musical forms other than American “Country” music. The addition of pedals greatly extends the capabilities of a steel guitar. Just as the logical extension of a chordal tuning is to give the player more chords at every fret, a scale tuning can be logically extended to give the player more scales at every fret.

Elementary music theory teaches us that the C scale can be altered to an F scale by flatting one note (B to Bb), and then to a Bb scale by flatting one more (E to Eb). In a similar fashion, the C scale can be altered to a G scale by sharping one note (F to F#), and then altered to a D scale by sharping one more (C to C#).

A third flat is accomplished by lowering the A to Ab, which in conjunction with the other two flatting changes makes an Eb scale. Likewise, a raise of the G to G# can be applied with the other two raises to create an A scale.

Thus, a pedal steel with 3 lowers and 3 raises can easily produce seven different scales at any fret. Applying these concepts to two pedals and four knee levers on an 8 string version of Jerry Byrd’s tuning yields the following pedal steel tuning:

The remaining five scales (E, B, F#, Ab and Db) are available at the first fret. Using this system, the player is never more than one fret away from any key signature at any fret.

This simple extension of Jerry Byrd’s tuning to the pedal steel requires a very low level of mechanical changer technology. Each string is altered in only one direction, and by only one pedal or knee lever. This “single raise or single lower” concept makes the tuning easy to set up on inexpensive “student model” instruments.

In contrast, the Nashville E9th requires a “double raise and single lower” changer to set up the standard pedal and knee lever changes. The advanced machinery required by the Nashville E9th tuning raises the price of student instruments beyond what many can afford.

A Justifiable Omission

You have probably noticed by now that the D note is absent from this tuning. This deliberate omission is to accommodate the nuances of just temperment. Many steel guitarists are attracted by the beauty of pure physical harmonies. If the guitar is to be tuned to natural string harmonics, the tuning of the D note becomes a dilemna.

Given C as a starting point, G is tuned to a perfect fifth and F to a perfect fourth. The A string is tuned as a perfect third of the F, using the F string’s harmonic point below the 4th fret as a reference. Similarly, the E and B strings are tuned as perfect thirds from the C and G strings, respectively.

The dilemna is that a D note that is in tune with the A string (derived as a third of F) is considerably flat of a D note that is in tune with the G string (derived as a fifth of C).

One of the pedal steel’s greatest strengths is its ability to create perfectly tuned (i.e. “just tempered”) music in any key. The compromise of the equal tempered scale, required by instruments that have twelve fixed pitches per octave, is not necessary on the steel guitar. While some steel guitarists use an electronic tuner to impose equal temperment on their instruments, forcing the twelve tone compromise as part of the tuning would do a disservice to those players who prefer the “sweeter” sound of just tempered chords.

By omitting the D string, the choice of temperment is left to the player.