Steel Guitar News

Hello fellow players,

I’m getting a lot of folks inquiring about pickups, guitar cord diameter and volume pedals again.  Let me hit these answer right quick for these nice folks.

Guitar cords should always be of the small diameter.  Extremely low resistance.  About all you really need to know is George L.  This company has the finest guitar cords for sound in the business, no question.  We’ve been handling these cords for the last 15 years.  These cords are preferred by Nashville’s finest players.  You having trouble with strings sounding like they are running together?  How about your highs disappearing?  

Well, you need George L small diameter cords and you need them all the way to your amplifier, not just part way.  This means George L cords to and from your volume pedal, to your amplifier and in and out of any effects units.  If you really want the best tone and you want the tone that your guitar is making, to get to your amplifier without any tonal change, George L is what you have to have.

There a lot of people asking me if we did financing here at Steel Guitar Nashville.  Every once in a while, we’ll do a layaway on an item, however with credit cards being so easy to get nowadays, we are not doing any financing.  That’s the way the banks make a living and since they don’t sell steel guitars, I won’t get into their financing.

Everybody seems to want to experiment with pickups.  I can see no reason not to do this, except that it pretty well tears your guitar up if you don’t know what you’re doing.  When it comes to brands of pickups, I’m having good results with the Alumatone on anything made by Fender, GFI, Emmons or Zum.  I haven’t really tried anything else yet.

A little bit of guitar massaging needs to be done to put these pickups in, however with a good $39 Dremel, you can do it well.  I am referring to Alumatone in this paragraph, however most other brands are even easier to install.

Of course, we still have the same problems with volume pedals and their pots wearing out that we have always had, however just remember, when it comes time to replace the pot, we’ll give you as big a discount as we possibly can on the new pot and parts to replace the pot and anything worn.

We have sold hundreds of the Hilton potless electronic pedals by now and have had almost no problem with any of them.  This is really the perfect solution to a sticky problem because the Hilton pedal does not require a pot.  Remember, if the pedal doesn’t have a pot, you don’t need to replace it.  We have one Hilton pedal on the floor in our demo room and it’s been there problem free for seven years.  Definitely worth the little extra money.

If you come to within two or three hundred miles of Nashville this summer on your vacation travels, be sure to come to beautiful Hendersonville on the lake.  Rather than me filling up your inbox, I’ll just tell you to google Hendersonville, Tennessee and look at the many pop, rock and country music stars that live in this little town and you can see that it’s located right up against Nashville and is genuinely the musical part of Music City.  

This is a very historical town and has been since 1789 when I was very young.  Many of Nashville’s greatest steel players live here along with most of Nashville’s greatest country music stars.  Plan on coming out and after you see me at Steel Guitar Nashville, take a drive around the lake and see where Tammy, George Jones, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Connie Smith and Marty Stuart and hundreds of other warbling hillbillies call home.  

There are also some tinkling steel guitar players here.  Of course, we have some chicken pickin’ lead players also and that sound in the distance you may hear could possibly be new construction going up, however it’s probably a drummer practicing for the break on Working Man Blues.

As most of you know, we have a pretty exotic instrument repair facility here.  Every once in awhile, an instrument will come in that we’ve heard on hundreds of recording sessions.  Instruments like the 200 plus year old acoustic bass that belongs to A-team bassist Henry Strzelecki.

Henry is one of the original studio A-team players and has been on many hundreds of hit songs recorded in Nashville, Tennessee.  Henry always has a smile and his hand out to shake your hand whenever he sees you.  A nicer personality I don’t know of.  Every big session I have ever worked with Henry has been pure pleasure and a big part because of him.  

Henry also wrote one of my favorite tunes, Long Tall Texan, a great song with comic overtones that went gold not long after its release.  Doing recording sessions for a living was not always fun, however if Henry was on the session, you just knew it was going to be very pleasant.

Steel guitar jam sessions or guitar pulls.  Sometimes steel players like to get together for a guitar pull or jam.  When they do they’ll setup in a round circle with one or two amps in the middle aiming straight up at the ceiling.  Something to keep time, a loud metronome or tracks or possibly even a live drummer and bass player.  Lord knows, don’t ever let a singer in one of these get-togethers because you’ll end up getting nothing done.

Each steel player will take about two verses, pass it to the next player, sit and study what everybody else plays and it doesn’t matter if it takes an hour per song.  Remember, you shouldn’t have anybody in there where you’re jamming that will be listening for their own musical pleasure.  The jam session is for musicians only and nobody else should be in the same town or county.  You’ll notice all the dogs and cats will leave the area.  You don’t need some girl or wife hanging around saying “Let ole Billy sing one!”  And you never, ever, ever setup a PA set on a jam session.

Ok troops.  Send me some questions about jam sessions if you wish.

Check out our monthly specials at  http://www.steelguitar.net/monthlyspecials.html and we’ll try to save you a lot of money.

Your Nashville buddy,
Bobbe
www.steelguitar.net
sales@steelguitar.net
www.youtube.com/bobbeseymour
www.myspace.com/bobbeseymour

Steel Guitar Nashville
123 Mid Town Court
Hendersonville, TN. 37075
(615) 822-5555
Open 9AM – 4PM Monday – Friday
Closed Saturday and Sunday