Ran across this from 2019 with my old friend, steel master Doug Jernigan, blowing down the old Bob Wills classic 'Roly Poly' with Carl Jackson and friends at Nashville's Station Inn. The Station is kind of like a Nashville Baked Potato, you often see big gun players letting their hair down there. Doug has had a session career, publishes his own Steel Guitar method(s) at www,digndoug.com, and has a zillion live dates under his belt.
Pedal steel is a beast. Fretless, no tempered tuning, and all those moving parts. Doug's axes run 8 pedals, four knee side levers, and four lifts, each of these puling an individual string sharp or flat, and oh yeah, you've got two necks tuned differently. I get a headache thinking about it. Here's the tuning chart for each 10-string neck:
Low to high, E9 neck (the back, closest to you neck):
B-D-E-F#-G#-B-B=E-G#-D#-F#
Then the front, the C7 neck:
C-F-A-C-E-G-A-C-E-G
I just love an instrument where the open tuning sounds like an eye chart.
