But I started slow, and eventually could hear the potential for decency if I stuck with it. I soon realized I’d have to make my own arrangement, to make it fit with C6 pedal steel, and add a melody part since Robert Plant wasn’t accompanying me. I wouldn’t mind practicing this for awhile. I recalled that it had a repeating bass line, was in a somewhat open tuning, and was catchy. I went home that day and dug out a tab for “Going to California” by Led Zeppelin, remembering how I always wished I could play it on guitar. Maybe pedal steel players could entertain audiences with just their pedal steel, like the slide players used to in the Delta. A thought popped into my head about Bobbe’s advice on patting, and using the technique to entertain with just a pedal steel, and no supporting instrumentation. Slide-playing is hard enough, but playing bass notes and singing with it: man, these guys were really ahead of the game back in the 1900s. What intrigued me about the slide players, besides selling their souls for better musical skills, was how they had to entertain audiences and parties with just their guitar, slide, and voice: just themselves. It almost seemed like the two branched off from one another at a fork in the road of time. A new day, a new cup of coffee in hand, I was astounded to learn of a connection between steel guitar and slide guitar in America’s history. I was also researching the history of the steel guitar, and Hawaiin music at this time. I decided I still wasn’t passionate about the C6 neck, and didn’t do much with it for awhile.Ī year later I got into listening to some really soulful music, more specifically bottleneck slide cats from back in the day, a few gospel outfits from way back when, and Aretha Franklin with King Curtis. I wasn’t able to let the C6 off the leash that day, but I was able to tinker with the idea, and a few of the chords Bobbe suggested. The coffee was hitting me, time to practice and take advantage of the stimulation. It sounded folky and jazzy to me, like Leo Kottke meets Ry Cooder I liked it. I watched in awe as he played a bass line with his thumb (“patting his thumb”is what he was calling it), and played a melody at the same time. He was a pro, in Pedal Steel City, with some great chops in these videos I was soaking up.
#Stuck in the middle with you bass tab how to#
It was like a magic trick, and here was Bobbe showing me how to do it on the World Wide Web, and he was from Nashville, TN, or what seemed to me to be the Pedal Steel Capital of the World. What really caught my attention was the chords he was playing, by just raking or strumming a bunch of strings in a row, without having to make funky right hand grips. I had to keep it within a certain range, or it’d run away, but still.
I felt good with my playing on the E9 neck, like I could let it off the leash wherever. I felt like Jackie does here: a little frustrated, but patient in the hopes of being able to be able to reach the neck.īut Bobbe made it look easy on those videos, even assuring that the neck was more intuitive or easy than the E9 neck. When I was first learning the C6 neck, it was frustrating. I could understand why players stuck with having only an E9 dog in the fight. I barely had any control over this C6 beast I had adopted, and had only been lightly toying around with Buddy Emmons’ Pocket Corner when playing. The name sounded familiar from the Steel Guitar Forum, and he had a smile on his face, so I decided to check the videos out (not literally like you used to check out videos from BlockBuster).īobbe had a lot of videos on C6, so I sipped away on my coffee, and watched most of them: with a steady eye on my C6 neck to make sure it wouldn’t bite me. The dew of morning, mixed with YouTube search results, brought forth various videos labeled Bobbe Seymour. I decided to browse for C6 learning material, and hold steady to avoid the pitfalls of viral videos.
I had just gotten this new tuning/neck a few months earlier I had been a single neck E9 player up until then, and had been playing pedal steel for about four years.Īfter taking a sip of black, light-roast coffee, I remembered that YouTube holds certain treasures of pedal steel past. In 2014, on a humid summer morning in North Carolina, I sat in my bedroom wondering if I’d ever be able to play something decent with my C6 neck.
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