Parts of a Dobro Guitar

Video Transcript

"On behalf of Expert Village, I'm Reno McCormick and I'm here to tell you about playing the Dobro today. You can play Dobro on any guitar, if you have is set up the way it needs to be set up. First, you have to take your nut and raise the nut, because when we use our bar, we're going to be hitting these strings slightly hard. So you don't want to be hitting the frets or hitting the neck, you get all these clunks and things. So we put a over sized nut in to raise the action. The inner workings of a Dobro are this. We have a cone. It's spun aluminum, looks like a flimsy UFO, maybe. I don't know. There's tension on this, on which your bridge sets, there's a spider bridge that has tension, and your strings run across this. So it's in effect a mechanical speaker, excited by the strings. And Les Paul ruined it for the Dobro actually in the old days. They invented this to take the place of guitar and then two years later, Les Paul came out with an electric guitar and these went into semi obscurity. Now they're back because they have such a different sound because of this speaker. So, we're going to show you how to play one now. "