Undercarriage of a Pedal Steel Guitar

Video Transcript

"On behalf of Expert Village, my name is Bill Bassett and I am here to tell you about how to play the pedal steel guitar. Now the under carries of a pedal steel guitar can be a little mysterious. It's not that often seen once the instrument is all set up and then being played. But as you can see there are devices called knee levers. This is what is going to be the pedal board. I'll be putting that together in a moment but as you can see all these rods that go across here, these actuate the cams that stretch or loosen the strings. I will use a knee lever as a demonstration. You can see as you move the lever that is attached to a belcrank here and a cross shaft which in turn is attached to several other belcranks transferring the energy laterally to the cams on the bridge. So every time you move a knee lever and on this guitar there are 5, this one pushes upward with your knee and they all activate different sets of strings and tune them in half steps or whole steps up or down depending on how you've got it set up. And this mechanism here is the underside of the bridge. You can see the springs that help return the string to its original tension. Most of what is inside there is under cover and it would be difficult to disassemble that to demonstrate how the cams in there work, so I am not even going to try that. If you look at the underside of the tuning mechanism, this is a keyless guitar. There are no tuning machines like there would be on a standard guitar or many other pedal steel guitars. These use just little roller thumb knobs, thumb screws that change the pitch of the string up and down and that's the underside of that. "