Sol Ho'opi'i and my year of Hawai'ian steel guitar.

About ten years ago, I traded in an old Boss Chorus Ensemble pedal for a National lap steel guitar at the Guitar Clinic in Hamilton.  Resplendent in a mother-of-toilet-seat pearloid finish, this sturdy plank was to capture my imagination for the next year or so.  Guitar Clinic staffer and mandolin god Randy Hill gave me a lead-filled Bakelite slide bar to get me started, and I was off.  At the time, I was doing a lot of private guitar teaching at a music store in Burlington, doing long shifts with student no-shows or cancellations happening often.  I started to bring my steel to work and practice on breaks.

I had fooled around with slide guitar since soon after I started playing, but I never really got the hang of it and feared open tunings.  The lap steel, though it resembles a guitar in many ways, is a very different instrument.  Here's Wikipedia's fine description:

The lap steel guitar is typically placed on the player's lap, or on a stool in front of the seated player.
Unlike a conventional guitar, the strings are not pressed to a fret when sounding a note; rather, the player holds a metal slide called steel (or tone bar) in the left hand, which is moved along the strings to change the instrument's pitch while the right hand plucks or picks the strings. This method of playing greatly restricts the number of chords available, so lap steel music often features melodies, a restricted set of harmonies (such as in blues), or another single part.

The steel guitar, when played in Hawaiian, Country, Bluegrass, or Western Swing styles, is almost always plucked using a plastic thumbpick affixed to the right hand's thumb, and metal or plastic "fingerpicks" fitted to the first 2, 3, or even all 4 fingers of the right hand. This allows the player greater control when picking sets of notes on non-adjacent strings. Some Blues players, especially those who use a round-neck resonator guitar played upright, conventional-guitar-style, with a bottleneck or hollow metal slide on one left-hand finger, forgo the fingerpicks and thumbpicks, and use their bare fingers and thumb instead.

I got started, as I have with many aspects of the guitar, with a book.  This was Stacy Phillips' The Art of Hawai'ian Steel Guitar book.  This book got me playing little Hawai'ian melodies like "Sweet Lei Lehua" and "Na Moku Eha".  Through playing the examples in that book, I came to appreciate the simple beauty of Hawai'ian music and the hellish difficulty of playing the lap steel well.  Stacy's book also acquainted me with the possibility of bar slants, which are tricky to execute (they involve a kind of one-handed juggle of the tone bar in the left hand) but are essential for getting around harmonic changes.  This allows the possibility of doing harmonized fills, and by straightening a slanted bar mid-note, pedal-steel like oblique "bends".  I found out years later that the tuning Stacy writes all of the book examples in, "high G open", is not a standard Hawai'ian tuning but IS a standard Dobro tuning.  This made it easier for me to make the transition to playing in the country style later on.

The Hawai'ian lap steel legend Sol Ho'opi'i (pronounced Ho-Oh-Pe-Ee with glottal stops between the first and second halves of the "oh" and "ee" vowel sounds, not like "hoopie") was my favourite Hawai'ian player at the time.   Born in 1902 in Honolulu, Sol came with his brothers to the mainland in 1924 to make his fortune.  And in Los Angeles, he did.  The U.S. was in the midst of a Hawai'ian fad, and his virtuosic steel playing was in demand.

Sol Ho'opi'i's was a cosmopolitan art.  His authentic Hawai'ian style also incorporated jazz and blues ideas, which give his recordings a certain hipness and swing where other old Hawai'ian records sound, well, old.



Sol eventually gave up pop music to follow the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, a fascinating figure herself who came into scandal.  He retired to Seattle and died of pneumonia there in 1953.
Here's a rare film of Sol after his religious conversion, playing hymns on the steel. "Bringing In The Sheaves" is my fave.



At one point in my year at Steel U., I got a lesson and further tips from Kim Deschamps, a Hamilton resident at that time who is now tearing up the Austin roots music scene.  Kim, who played for many years in Blue Rodeo and the Cowboy Junkies, and whom Blue Rodeo's Jim Cuddy dubbed "the Duke Ellington of the pedal steel" played, like me, without plastic or metal fingerpicks.  In our lesson I remember that he advocated a relentless right-hand damping scheme involving four fingers.  Each finger would damp (or deaden) one string and remain in place unless the string was sounding a note at that moment.  I've never mastered this technique - it requires right-hand finger independence that I'm not close to having at this point.  But it's a big reason behind Kim's warm and organic yet clean and accurate sound on the steel guitar, be it lap or pedal.

The tuning issue is what eventually slowed my progress on the Hawai'ian style. I went to Mississauga for a lesson with a real old-time Hawai'ian steel player.  I can't recall his name now.  But we quickly learned that I was playing in a non-standard tuning, G B D G B D low to high.  I like this tuning because three of the strings are the same as standard tuning, and because the same three note group is duplicated over two octaves, many shapes and licks can be adapted.  But the standard Hawai'ian tuning, the tuning of record, was C6 tuning, which is also a standard pedal steel tuning (though with a lot more strings).  This tuning, C E G A C E low to high, requires restringing of the instrument with the equivalent of a fifth string, fourth string, third string, another third string, a second and a first string.  There's also very little visual commonality between C6 and standard tuning (which I guess I should start referring to as "Spanish tuning").  And let's not forget about the big ol' major second between two adjacent strings (G and A).  I got a Mel Bay C6 steel guitar book but the thrill was gone.

Luckily I had a lot of nifty slanted bar licks that adapted well to country steel.  Not long after I moved to Toronto in 2003 I got a call from Justin Rutledge, who was putting together a band for a Monday night residency at the Cameron House on Queen Street West in Toronto.  I joined that band and we did a year of Mondays in the front room.  Though I later played more electric guitar with the group, I was hired as a steel player.  I continued to use the "high G open" tuning and began to incorporate echo and reverb into my nascent steel style.  I didn't play steel for a few years after that gig ended, but have returned to it more and more lately.  A recent highlight for me was playing the lap steel parts in "A Pillow Of Winds" and "One Of These Days" in a performance of Pink Floyd's album "Meddle" at the Phoenix in Toronto.