Steel Guitar

Steel guitar is a type of guitar or the method of playing the instrument. Developed in Hawaii in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a steel guitar is usually positioned horizontally; strings are plucked with one hand, while the other hand changes the pitch of one or more strings with the use of a bar or slide called a steel (generally made of metal, but also of glass or other materials). The earliest use of an electrified steel guitar was first made in the early 1930s by Bob Dunn of Milton Brown and His Brownies, a western swing band from Fort Worth, Texas; the instrument was perfected in the mid to late 1930s by Fort Worth's Leon McAluff, who played for western swing band Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. Nashville later picked up the use of the steel guitar in the early days of the late 1940s and early 1950s "Honky Tonk" country & western music with a number of fine steel guitarists backing names like Hank Williams, Lefty Frizell and Webb Pierce. The term steel guitar is often mistakenly used to describe any metal body resophonic guitar.

Steel guitar can describe:

Steel guitar refers to a method of playing on a guitar held horizontally, with the treble strings uppermost and the bass strings towards the player, and using a type of slide called a steel above the fingerboard rather than fretting the strings with the fingers. This may be done with any guitar, but is most common on instruments designed and produced for this style of play, typically with painted lines instead of frets, since the strings are much too high to be fretted. Playing a steel guitar with a steel can be quite challenging, and great (non-pedal) steel players are few and far between, because of some of the techniques involved such as slanting the bar, palm damping, thumb damping, and unique styles of picking are not easily mastered.

The technique was invented and popularized in Hawaii. Thus, the lap steel guitar is sometimes known as the Hawaiian guitar, particularly in documents from the early 20th century, and today any steel guitar is frequently called a Hawaiian steel guitar. However, Hawaiian guitar often refers to slack key guitar, played in the conventional or Spanish position, using a conventional fretted guitar in various open tunings, generally with the strings tuned considerably lower than usual. Steel guitar tunings tend to feature close intervals (2nds and 3rds) whereas slack key tunings more often contain 4ths and 5ths.

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