Pedal Steel emulation on guitar

D

Dennis01

Member
I'm trying to emulate a pedal steel guitar with my FM9 using a Roland EV-5 expression pedal- (I also have an Ernie Ball volume pedal). Any suggestion on settings of the volume curve in the Volume-Pan block? Or any suggestions at all?
There is a guy playing a Strat with James Taylor (on Sweet Baby James ) who has it nailed using a volume pedal and a tremolo bar. I'm finding my attack not to be really very smooth - it has a more on-off type quality rather than a smooth fade in. I've messed with the Slope and Scale etc .. still not happy. Maybe I just need to practice my volume pedal technique more - who knows?

Thanks for any suggestions!

I wanted to post the URL - but I guess I have not made enough posts on this forum to be able to post the URL (an anti-spam measure). Anyway if you go to Youtube and type in -

James Taylor - Sweet Baby James (from Squibnocket)​

It will come up -

* Maybe someone who has been on this forum could paste the URL in for me in a response?
 
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bumping this one up , I think the Digitech had a preset that used to do it with an Auto swell and a Pitch shift to do the bends
Anyone have any luck or tips how to do it on the Fractal ?
 
A compressor into a volume pedal is a big part of it. The MXR Dynacomp works well. Then a tape delay somewhere after those helps get that shimmering slide sound.

Matt’s right, the right pedal taper makes at easier but I got used to whichever I used at the time and made it work.

Guthrie Goven bends individual notes inside his chords and sounds amazingly like a pedal steel, but he’s Guthrie Goven.
 
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I play pedal steel, in addition to a Fender B bender.
Looking forward to getting my FM9 and dialing in a nice (Red Rhodes) tones, like the original song does.
Vince Gill makes his Telecaster sound like a pedal steel at times. But there's nothing like using the knee levers and floor pedals on a pedal steel, that makes it so cool sounding. I've tried so many effect pedals, to emulate a pedal steel guitar on a regular 6 string. Its more technique than anything else, with a good volume pedal being the key.
 
Hotraman said:
I play pedal steel, in addition to a Fender B bender.
Looking forward to getting my FM9 and dialing in a nice (Red Rhodes) tones, like the original song does.
Vince Gill makes his Telecaster sound like a pedal steel at times. But there's nothing like using the knee levers and floor pedals on a pedal steel, that makes it so cool sounding. I've tried so many effect pedals, to emulate a pedal steel guitar on a regular 6 string. Its more technique than anything else, with a good volume pedal being the key.
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David Grissom, the guy who co-designed the PRS DGT model, also uses pedal-steel-type bends inside his double and triple stops… with 11s on his guitar. His fingers must have muscles of steel.
 
Randalljax said:
bumping this one up , I think the Digitech had a preset that used to do it with an Auto swell and a Pitch shift to do the bends
Anyone have any luck or tips how to do it on the Fractal ?
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I’ve never heard a pitch shifter come close.

If we had a hex-pickup input and we had six pitch shifters so each could shift a particular string, and we could change the offsets on the fly with glissando as the offsets change, like the knee and foot pedals of a real pedal-steel, then maybe it’d work. Otherwise it’d be no better than a tremolo bar which is a pale comparison to what a lap-steel player can do, let alone a pedal-steel. And auto-swell is useful but not nearly as controllable or expressive as the compressor and volume pedal.

A digital rig like six modelers in one, that was designed for pedal-steel players, would be an amazing instrument, but talk about a niche market… maybe three or six FM3, three FM9, or two FX3 in a rack, splitting the hex-pickup outputs to each, then use MIDI to coordinate the pitch bending…. Jerry Douglas would find something to do with it. :)
 
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I remember watching this live a while back with David Ryan Harris and he was able to get a cool pedal steel kinda sound using a pog with swell.
 
unix-guy said:
A Guitar For The Practicing Musician hoodie? How old is that thing!?
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old as dirt like some of us! I think about 2000 was the end of that rag. I tore all the tab out of those mags from mid 1980s to mid 1990s, still have them in a file cabinet.
 
What I teach my students is practice bending each note to pitch below your target note within scales and chords. The comp into the volume pedal can help. Check out Guthrie and Greg Koch for some ideas. Greg doesn’t use a volume pedal just the volume on the guitar which also works. Practice it. It is all about the timing and not trying to bend bluesy vs to pitch and abrupt.
 
Are you asking about emulating the actual changer action (i.e., bending the notes)? If so, the only way I’ve gotten close is by using the harmonizer and then an expression pedal to bend between different intervals above the picked note. Or you bend within doublestops/chords, but there’s only so much you can do, and bending different notes up and down at the same time gets very difficult …

For the volume pedal aspect, just set up a volume pedal as normal.

For sliding from one chord to the next (i.e., moving the bar), I don’t know how that could be practically emulated with the existing blocks. In theory you could set up a harmonizer to slide multiple pitches up or down at the same time, and by different amounts, but you’d be relatively limited compared to the myriad combinations available on a typical pedal steel setup.

I tried for years to emulate pedal steel, and eventually just bought a pedal steel and am learning to play…
 
This fella does a good job on a II, I would use a little less swell and delay but it sounds pretty good, forward into later into the video for the best examples

 
EricGlass said:
This fella does a good job on a II, I would use a little less swell and delay but it sounds pretty good, forward into later into the video for the best examples

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He was (is) a forum member here. I believe he's the primary guitarist on Australia's Got Talent.
 
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