The pedal steel guitar is a string instrument mounted horizontally on a frame and played while seated. The player typically plucks the strings with the right hand while moving a steel bar along the strings with the left. The instrument has no resonance chamber; its sound is transmitted by an electric pickup to an amplifier. Like all steel guitars, the pedal steel can produce smooth glissandi (sliding notes) and controlled vibrato, expressive techniques akin to the human singing voice.

What distinguishes the pedal steel from earlier steel guitars is a set of foot pedals and knee levers that raise or lower the pitch of selected strings. The mechanism was developed in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s to extend the instrument's harmonic capabilities. It allowed players to form chords and voicings that were previously unavailable on a steel guitar, and its pedals enabled distinctive sounds that became a defining element of country music in the latter half of the twentieth century.

The first No. 1 Billboard country recording to feature pedal steel was Webb Pierce's 1954 song, "Slowly", on which Bud Isaacs demonstrated a novel technique of pushing a pedal to change pitches within a chord while existing notes in it were still sounding. The popularity of this unique harmonic motif influenced lap steel guitarists to switch to pedal-equipped instruments.

Innovations by Buddy Emmons, Jimmy Day, Zane Beck, Paul Bigsby, and others established many of the mechanical and tuning conventions used on the modern pedal steel guitar. Although most closely associated with country music, the pedal steel has also been adopted in diverse genres, including western swing, jazz, rock, pop and Sacred Steel.

Design and operation

A typical modern E9 pedal steel has ten strings, three foot pedals, and five knee levers. The designation of the chord “E9” does not mean that all ten strings are ordinarily sounded together to make that chord. Rather, the tuning (open strings, no pedals or levers) contains the notes of an E9 chord on strings 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, and 10, along with additional notes that provide melodic and harmonic possibilities. Typically, a player attaches picks on the thumb, index, and middle fingers of the right hand, and selects compatible groups of strings, commonly called “grips,” to produce particular chords or voicings. The left hand lightly presses the steel (a polished steel bar) on a perpendicular angle across the strings, and moves it along the neck to change the pitch as the strings are being plucked. The instrument has no frets, only markers that look like frets to serve as visual guides for positioning the bar. Modern pedal steel players may push pedals while the strings are sounding and the bar is in motion. The pedals and knee levers will allow playing a major scale using pedals without moving the bar.

The mechanism

The foot pedals are attached to long metal rods linked to pivot shafts beneath the instrument. These shafts operate pull rods that extend across the underbody to individual changer fingers at the end of the guitar (pictured). Each string is attached to a changer finger which rotates slightly when a pedal or knee lever is activated. This action changes the string’s tension and raises or lowers its pitch by a predetermined interval, commonly a semitone or whole tone.When the pedal or lever is released, springs return the string to its original pitch.

Tuning the pedals

The open strings are tuned at the instrument's headstock as on a conventional guitar, but changes produced by the pedals and knee levers are adjusted independently in a small compartment at the end of the guitar on the player's right (pictured). It houses recessed rows of hexagonal nylon tuning rods, each mechanically linked to a pedal or lever. The purpose is to correct a common problem whereby a chord struck without touching a pedal may be in perfect tune, but pushing the pedal produces an out-of-tune chord. To correct it, the pedal itself is held down while the appropriate tuning rod is adjusted to correct pitch with a tuning wrench (pictured). These adjustments are made only after the open strings have been tuned accurately.

Volume pedal

A volume pedal, also known as an expression pedal, is a standard accessory and an important source of the instrument’s characteristic sustained, flowing sound. It is not a part of the instrument itself, but is plugged in between it and the amplifier, and is operated by the player’s right foot, which typically rests on the volume pedal at all times. Players manipulate it frequently during songs. Rather than serving merely as a volume control, the pedal is used dynamically: the player may reduce the level during the initial attack then increase it as the note decays, extending apparent sustain. This reduces the initial string noise on the pick's attack and creates an effect similar to the entry of a violin section.

Development

The pedal steel guitar emerged from earlier steel guitar designs. The acoustic Hawaiian guitar, now called the lap steel, was followed by resonator guitars modified to make them louder. The development of the electromagnetic pickup in the early 1930s led to electrified lap steels and, subsequently, console steels. The popularity of electric instruments encouraged the production of dedicated guitar amplifiers and freed instrument makers from the need to retain the traditional guitar shape. Manufacturers rapidly began producing rectangular steel guitars with electric pickups, precursors of the pedal steel.

By the late 1940s, the harmonic limitations of fixed tunings on a steel guitar had become increasingly apparent to musicians. According to author Winnie Winston, "the limitations of playing all notes in a straight line became obvious." Certain chords were virtually impossible to make, and players needed a way to have different voicings on the same guitar without stopping to retune. To get those voicings, scores of different tunings were tried by lap steel players. Some musicians kept an additional lap steel (with an alternate tuning) on hand to be used for certain songs. Players learned to slant the bar across the strings to obtain individual notes within a chord. Accurate intonation doing this requires considerable practice because the necessary angle varies with string spacing and fret position; in three-note slants, it may be impossible to bring every note precisely into tune. Another attempted solution was to add more strings, thereby extending the instrument’s range and allowing narrower pitch intervals between strings. Adding strings was another incremental step toward making more harmonically complex songs possible.

Musicians began placing two or more differently tuned necks on the same instrument. Performers such as Noel Boggs and Leon McAuliffe routinely switched between necks during a performance, and triple-neck instruments such as the Fender Stringmaster or a Rickenbacker 758 remained in use well into the 1950s. The trend culminated in guitars with as many as four different necks. Although effective, multi-neck console steels were cumbersome and unaffordable by many musicians, leading inventors to seek a mechanical alternative.

Early pedal mechanisms

Initially, musicians sought a pedal mechanism that would change the pitch of all the strings simultaneously, effectively emulating a second neck. In 1939, bandleader Alvino Rey worked with machinist John Moore to design a pedal-operated electric steel guitar. Gibson subsequently introduced Rey's design in 1940 as the "Electraharp", which featured pedals radially oriented from a single axis at the instrument's left rear leg. Only 43 were sold before production was halted, but the U.S. entry into World War II may have been a factor. After the war, Gibson redesigned and reintroduced the Electraharp and Bud Isaacs used one on the song "Big Blue Diamonds" for King Records. Jay D. Harlin and his brothers in Indianapolis developed the Multi-Kord, whose pedal mechanisms could be configured to raise or lower any combination of strings. Pedal resistance increased with the number of strings being changed simultaneously. None of these proposals caught on with musicians enough to diminish the popularity of the multi-necked instruments.

Paul Bigsby

One of the most influential pedal innovations among the various competing designs was developed in the late 1940s by a southern California man named Paul Bigsby, a former industrial pattern maker, motorcycle engineer, racer, and amateur musician. Later in his career he turned to musical instrument design. Bigsby achieved commercial success with a vibrato tailpiece he designed for conventional guitars, and he built quality multi-neck lap steels played by prominent artists. Aware of the lap steel’s limitations, he sought a more practical means of overcoming them. He developed a cable-and-pulley mechanism operated by foot pedals mounted on a rack between the instrument’s front legs. His first pedal steel guitar was made in 1948 for Speedy West. The effectiveness of Bigsby’s mechanism quickly attracted attention, and he was asked to build pedal steels for leading American players, including West, Noel Boggs, and Bud Isaacs. He built each instrument individually in a small shop behind his home, eventually accumulating a waiting list of approximately two years. Speedy West remembered Bigsby as a perfectionist who performed every aspect of the work himself, including the administrative duties: “He would not hire employees ... he just didn’t think anyone else could do what Paul Bigsby could do.”

Bud Isaacs' country music breakthrough

In 1953, Bud Isaacs received one of Bigsby's new creations, a double-neck steel which featured one pedal for each neck to change the pitch of two strings. In practicing while learning to use the pedal, Isaacs pushed it while notes in a chord were still sounding. Other steel players strictly avoided doing this, because it was considered "un-Hawaiian". When Isaacs was in a studio session in 1953, recording Webb Pierce's song, "Slowly", he pushed the pedal while notes were still sounding; the producer liked the effect and encouraged him to use it. One note remained the same, while one or two lower strings slurred upward to harmonize with it. Perfect intonation of both the starting and finishing chords was achieved. This unique harmonic motif was virtually impossible with the older (non-pedal) lap steels. The resulting distinctive style of playing became a defining characteristic of the country music coming out of Nashville for decades thereafter. When the record was released in 1954, it caused a virtual revolution among lap steel players across the nation who wanted to adapt their non-pedal instruments to duplicate that lick—to the extent of trying to build homemade pedal mechanisms. The song was the first Billboard country chart-topper to feature pedal steel.

Standardization of the modern pedal instrument

The pedal steel design rapidly eclipsed the lap steel as many players switched to pedal models in the 1950s. Eventually, only pockets of lap steel devotees were left in country and Hawaiian music. The pedal steel became the dominant steel guitar heard in country music.

Buddy Emmons