Lap Steel Guitar Tuning Hawaiian

Instruction for hawaiian and lap steel guitar including information on tunings arrangements in tablature and covering hawaiian western swing and country playing styles.

Lap steel guitar tuning hawaiian.

Scale positions on the top strings translated directly to the bottom strings. Either the hawaiian guitar or the spanish guitar. You ll recognize sounds while your learning and playing the steel guitar. The earliest hawaiian lap steel tuning was open a low bass e a e a c e.

E c a g e c. Hawaiian lap steel guitar strings are available in many different tunings. Designed to fit in your guitar case slide rules includes over 70 of the. It s a combination tuning.

Brad bechtel s excellent website is chock full of tunings. We carry string sets designed for g high bass g d am am6 am7 c6 and c7 tunings. Open a raises each of those notes a whole tone 2 frets to e a e a c e. The 8 string version i m discussing here is high to low e c a f d c b a.

It won t sound hawaiian or country if you don t play it like you would for country or hawaiian music. Also it s important to listen to lots of hawaiian steel guitar so you ll become familiar with the sounds and get them into your mind. Today most open tunings for lap steel guitar fall into 3 primary categories. Steel guitar really shines as a melody instrument and on lap steel fully harmonized melodies are not only possible but sometimes required.

Hawaiian lap steel guitar strings are designed to be used only on steel guitars. C6 and a6 are extremely versatile tunings for 6 and 8 string lap steel. The e13th and diatonic tunings have very little repetition of notes so they are not as easy to conceptualize. Remove two or four strings and you have your lap steel string gauges.

B11 is rich in 9th and 7th chords and works especially well for hawaiian songs. Andy volk has written an excellent guide to steel guitar tunings. It s the most comprehensive lap steel course i know of. These sets will work on hawaiian lap steels some table steels and some pedal steel guitars.

One you laid on your lap the other one you stuck under your arm. Part of it is a6 and the other part is b7 b9 b11. Blues and rock open g open a or open d open e open g is tuned d g d g b d. There are a few variations of the tuning.

Start with c6th high to low. When i started my musical adventure there were only two types of guitars.