See also Slide guitar and Bottleneck guitar

Intro

Steel guitars range from modified spanish guitars through Weissenborns to D10 pedal steels and beyond. Not everyone is happy calling a D10 a guitar at all, but it's not obvious where you draw the line. So we'll call them all guitars.

Caution

Steel guitar tunings are for steel guitars. They often use gauges and tensions that would break a conventional guitar. See slide guitar for more on this.

Types

There are three main types of steel guitar, with a couple of subtypes:

• Lap steel guitars are played (wait for it) across your lap. They include acoustic guitars known (confusingly) as lap slide guitars, of which the most famous is the Weissenborn, and square-neck resonator guitars, of which the most famous is the Dobro. Solid-body electric versions are often called Hawaiian guitars, except in Hawaii, where this means something else completely. Some have two necks but this is rare.
• Table steel guitars (also called console steel guitars) are solid-body electric instruments and are either placed on a table in front of you, or stand on their own built-in legs which are generally folding or detachable. They tend to have several necks and/or eight or more strings per neck, but the line between electric lap steel and table steel is very fuzzy, and many makers and players just call them steel guitars. One or two necks is common, three not unusual, and there's at least one four-neck model by a major maker.
• Pedal steel guitars are electric instruments that stand on their own legs, and you sit on a piano stool and use your feet and knees to operate pedals and knee levers that change the string tunings as you play. Almost always custom-built to order, most commonly one or two ten-string necks, never more than two necks or less than ten strings per neck, twelve strings per neck not unusual and fifteen string single neck examples exist.

External links

• http://www.well.com/user/wellvis/steel.html Brad's page of Steel, highly recommended.