How to Play Chords on 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 pedal steel guitars are tuned to open chord in a general sense. There are also other intervals tuned into it and of the pedal steel guitar, the types that you will encounter are double neck tin string guitars, there are single neck 12 string guitars like mine and there are even combinations of some people put a 13 string on. But in any event, the whole idea is that you have the basic major chord triad available to you in an open tuning. This is a tuning called a 12 string universal which allows me a whole bunch of possibilities. Primarily that we are going to be talking about an E- tuning that has some other intervals tuned in. Let's just start with the basic. Let's take an E major chord. Got an E, G sharp, we have a B and another E at the top and that's an E major triad. Every guitar should know one as soon as they start playing the guitar. Now where do we go from an E, naturally you tend to want to play an A major chord. And that is accomplished by simply pushing down a couple of pedals and change the G sharp to an A and I change the B to a C sharp and now I have an A major chord. Believe it or not that is the basic. Everything else is built on that principle. It's the 1 chord and 4 chord. You can play licks off of that all night long. That is if you learned nothing else in this little segment, 1 the 4, open, press the 2nd and 3rd pedal down and you have an A major chord E to A, as simple as it gets. "