Pedal steel guitar
Like all steel guitars, it can play unlimited glissandi (sliding notes) and deep vibrati—characteristics it shares with the human voice.
Pioneers in the development of the instrument include Buddy Emmons, Jimmy Day, Bud Isaacs, Zane Beck, and Paul Bigsby.
In the late 19th century, Spanish guitars were introduced in the Hawaiian Islands by European sailors and Mexican "vaqueros".
[2] To change chords, they used some smooth object, usually a piece of pipe or metal, sliding it over the strings to the fourth or fifth position, easily playing a three-chord song.
Dopyera and his brother Rudy, showed Beauchamp a prototype of theirs which looked like a big Victrola horn attached to a guitar, but it was not successful.
[7] Their next attempt yielded some success with a resonator cone, resembling a large metal loudspeaker, attached under the bridge of the guitar.
The new resonator invention was promoted at a lavish party in Los Angeles and demonstrated by the well-known Hawaiian steel player Sol Hoopii.
[7] Beauchamp enrolled in electronics courses and, for his first effort, he made a single-string guitar out of a 2x4 piece of lumber and experimented with phonograph pickups, but had no success.
[7] In 1931, the Great Depression was at its worst, and people were not buying guitars; in addition, the patent office delayed on the application, in part because they had no category for the invention—was it a musical instrument or an electrical device?
Beauchamp was ultimately deprived of economic benefit for his invention because his competitors rapidly improved on it making his specific patent obsolete.
Instrument makers rapidly began making them into a rectangular block of wood with an electric pickup, the precursor of the pedal steel.
According to music writer Michael Ross, the first electrified stringed instrument on a commercial recording was a western swing tune by Bob Dunn in 1935.
This meant a bigger and heavier instrument, now called a "console" which necessitated putting it on a stand or legs rather than the performer's lap.
[18] In 1939, a guitar called the "Electradaire" featured a pedal controlling a solenoid, triggering an electrical apparatus to change the tension on the strings.
That same year, bandleader Alvino Rey worked with a machinist to design pedals to change the pitch of strings but was without success.
[19] The Gibson Guitar Company introduced the "Electraharp" in 1940, which featured pedals radially oriented from a single axis at the instrument's left rear leg.
The instrument was not popular and only 43 were sold before production was halted, but the U.S. entry into World War II played a part in lack of demand.
[14] After WW II, Gibson redesigned and reintroduced the Electraharp and Bud Isaacs used one on the song "Big Blue Diamonds" for King Records.
In 1953, Bud Isaacs received one of Bigsby's new creations, a double-neck steel which featured pedals to change the pitch of only two strings.
"[20] It was the birth of the future sound of country music and caused a virtual revolution among steel players who wanted to duplicate it.
Emmons made other innovations to the steel guitar, adding two additional strings (known as "chromatics") and a third pedal, changes which have been adopted as standard in the modern-day E9 instrument.
[34][2] In the United States in the 1930s, during the steel guitar's wave of popularity, the instrument was introduced into the House of God, a branch of an African-American Pentecostal denomination, based primarily in Nashville and Indianapolis.
[35]: 60 This musical genre, known as "Sacred Steel" was largely unknown until, in the 1980s, a minister's son named Robert Randolph took up the instrument as a teenager, and has popularized it and received critical acclaim as a musician.
[36] Neil Strauss, writing in the New York Times, called Randolph "one of the most original and talented pedal steel guitarists of his generation.
