How Do You Play a Dobro

Video Transcript

"How to play the dobro? The dobro, really is nothing more really than a resonator guitar. It was devised by a pair of brothers, Dopyera, or something like that, was their name, and so the dobro name came from a spin-off of the brothers' name who invented the resonator guitar really, and Gibson actually owns the rights to the Dobro brand now. But really, there's no difference between a dobro and a resonator. It has an inverted cone, a dobro, originally they had used an inverted cone, and that is especially attributed to a dobro characteristic of a resonator guitar. But how they are played are really your, the same as the resonator. Of course, you have the kind with the square neck which you are forced to play across your lap, so the type of resonator guitar or dobro that has that square neck. I don't know if you've seen that, it's a square block, and this guitar does not have that, but it's a square block, as if it was never sanded down to make a nice proper neck, it's just a big square block behind. So that forces you to play the guitar, you're not able to reach around and play it this way. So you're going to play that type of a guitar, resonator or dobro, with a, usually you're going to use a steel bar, you know, here we have a regular cortisone medicine bottle, and you play it across the top of the neck like this with your left hand. And then it's also played in this fashion like a regular guitar, a resonator is played, and usually they're played with a slide, either a glass slide as I have here, or a steel bar as I discussed when you're laying it across your lap. But it also can be played with the fingers, but it is ninety percent of the time played with a slide of some kind."