That's when it hit me.
A simple lap steel guitar oughtn't cost too much cash and might have some potential for new and interesting sounds and add to my generally skimpy repertoire.
It was the work of a few minutes to find this on the GC page and I immediately placed an order:
It arrived here today, and it was the work of a few minutes to get it unpacked. Shipping was free and even though I had to pay the state of Illinois some four or five dollars in sales tax it was worth the doing.
I have a notion that lap steels are making a modest comeback from their heyday in the thirties, forties and fifties, as people are returning to music that is more authentic and unfiltered and unprocessed.
The Rogue lap steel comes with three furniture style extendable legs that screw into three mating sockets on the underside of the guitar. One was loose and the guitar was kind of wobbly because of the following.
As the parent wood is kind of soft, a few of the screws were stripped out. However, the cure is found by breaking off a toothpick in each hole that is stripped, putting a dab of Loctite cyanoacrylate glue in, and running the wood screw back down to hold the sockets permanently.
That took all of five minutes. It pays to be handy with tools.
It took a few minutes to find a tuning video on youtube which has come to be everyman's encyclopedia of everything. A C6 tuning gives you a C major on the lower three strings and an A minor on the upper three.
The tone is nice and mellow, and I think it will be just fine as it is. It came with knurled knobs, which could be fun for doing swells if I didn't have the big assed Ernie Ball volume pedal someone gave me.
I will have to obtain a steel bar and some finger picks and learn a few basic riffs. If I'd gone and bought a lathe and milling machine I could make my own steels, but I didn't. Dammit.
Stay tuned as they say.
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