Chuck på pedal steel
19. oktober 2016“There’s a Chuck Berry recording where he plays pedal steel on a 12-bar blues. It’s called “Deep Feeling,†and it’s on the other side of one of those famous cuts. You’ll know right away what it is although you’ve heard it before and probably didn’t recognize what it was. You probably thought it was just an extremely well-articulated guitar or maybe slide guitar. But you listen to it and it’s pedal steel. He plays it in a way that nobody else plays it, and it’s really beautiful. There are other guys who play pedal steel blues, but nobody’s been able to get out of that stiff phrasing. Nobody’s really gotten into playing the steel with a super amount of expression. It’s like a sitar; anything you can do with strings you can do on steel. You can create any number of microtonal variations. By rolling the bar you can get all different speeds of vibrato. The kinds of things you come up with on the pedal steel are usually along the lines of chordal and transitional things. The steel really lends itself to harmonic changes. For example, chord sequences are something you fall into on the pedal steel, just goofing with it. It’s not really a linear instrument; it’s more a simultaneous instrument, if you know what I mean. With the guitar you have linear stuff, then blocky stuff, linear stuff, then blocky stuff. With the pedal steel you could conceivably think and execute three lines at once. It can do that. That’s the thing that’s wow. Listen, you can experiment with contrary motion. It’s difficult to do that on the guitar. Musically, I tend to think in long, emotional, expressive lines. On the steel that tends to be what I find myself playing.” – Jerry Garcia, 1971
