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Table steel guitar

This version was saved 15 years ago View current version     Page history
Saved by Andrew Alder
on April 2, 2009 at 2:15:12 am
 

Intro

A table steel guitar is a pedal steel guitar without pedals (or knee levers), and with fewer strings per neck, and often with more necks to make up for these two limitations. Because of the lack of pedals, it's not essential for a table steel to have legs, and a few models are instead placed on a table for playing.

 

Another way of looking at this is that a table steel is any steel guitar that isn't a lap steel guitar, but isn't a pedal steel either. All table steels in practice are electric, like pedal steels. A prototypical example of the table steel is the Fender Stringmaster, with from two to five necks. Fender simply called the Stringmaster a steel guitar. Gibson manufactured similar instruments such as the Gibson Console Grande, and as a result Gibson fanciers tend to call any table steel guitar a console steel guitar.

 

The line between an electric lap steel and a table steel can be fuzzy. This site considers any guitar that can comfortably be played in lap steel fashion to be a lap steel, not a table steel. Many electric lap steels, including even some tiny single-neck six-stringers, have legs that are detachable or folding, but that doesn't make it a different instrument, and particularly doesn't have any effect on the choice of tuning, which is our focus here of course.

 

By this criterion, all table steels in practice seem to have eight strings per neck and from two to five necks; Anything smaller is playable as a lap steel, the Regal 8/7 with eight strings on the near neck and seven on the far neck for example, and anything with more strings per neck has pedals too. The configuration with two eight-string necks is borderline; Some are lap steels but most are table steels, so tunings for them are found on this page.

 

Table steels normally have two or three necks, four is rarer but Fender had the Stringmaster Quad in their catalog for many years and Gibson made a similar instrument, and five rarer still but both Fender and Gibson built them too and there are surviving examples of both makes, all of them looking rather like a two and a three neck model bolted together.

 

A similar naming convention is used to that of the pedal steel guitar; D8 or double eight means two eight string necks, T8 or triple eight is three of eight strings each, and Q8 or quad eight four eight string necks. The five string models are called quint eight or just quint, as Q8 is already taken to mean four.

 

For many creative purposes the pedal steel guitar has replaced the table steel, but the table steel still has players and enthusiasts.

 

Tunings

 

Lacking pedals, table steel guitars boast a far greater variety of tunings than pedal steels.

 

There are two fairly standard E7 tunings:

  • E - G# - B - d  - e - g# - b - e'

 

  • E -  B - d  - e - g# - b - d - e'

 

Note that these changing between these two requires six of the eight string gauges to be changed, but if you move strings 3-7 and 2-6 up or down one place, you only actually need one new string.

 

External links

 

 

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