On this video: Redd Volkaert - Home in San Antone - YouTube
She’s great!
According to the comments, it’s Cindy Cashdollar. Here she is giving a lesson.
Nice playing and interesting seeing close up just how much higher the strings are from the fretboard than they are on a normal guitar.
Walken (great name, BTW!) beat me to it, but when I saw the words, “great”, “steel player” and “she”, I knew it had to be Cindy. Her playing is as brilliant as her teaching.
Slide guitar has also been adopted (and adapted) by some Indian Classical Music musicians due to its ability to glide between notes. Here’s a video of perhaps the most famous player using a slide guitar within the Indian music tradition.
I think you’ll find that’s a nonpedal steel guitar.
She’s wonderful; I look forward to checking these links out.
So I’ve been looking at the Wikipedia pages on steel and slide guitar. Here are the different types ways of playing a slide guitar:
- normal guitar, held in normal position or across lap, using a slide such as a “bottleneck slide”.
- lap steel guitar, including lap slide guitars and resonator guitars. They can look similar to a conventional guitar or more specialized.
- console steel guitar, typically with multiple necks and more strings per neck and the larger size means they have have legs to stand on, rather than being placed on the lap.
- pedal steel guitar, a further development from the console steel with the addition of pedals and knee levers which can change the pitch (such as raising a chord by a fourth).
It looks as though Cindy Cashdollar is playing a console steel guitar in the O.P. video and a lap steel guitar in the lesson I linked to.
Well, damn, thanks for pointing that out. I hadn’t noticed.
Thanks to all. I don’t spend much time listening to this genre but wanted to add Redd to my Pandora mix and ran across this vid in the process. I was completely unfamiliar with her work until now and plan to check out more of it!
I am no slide expert, but play some on my guitars.
This is all basically correct.
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Folks play slide on regular “Spanish” guitars, held traditionally in Standard and various Open tunings. This is what I do and most rock and blues slide players do. I play slide in Open G, so I detune my A down to G and my high E down to D in order to get the open chord (I ignore my low E).
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Lap Steels are played on, well, your lap ;), with the slide usually a bar you hold down, like Cindy does in the video, vs. a tube you wear on your finger when holding it Spanish style. There are acoustic lap steels, with some of the famous ones made by Weissenborn and Lyon & Healy back at the start of the 20th century, up through the Hawaiian craze*.
The console and pedal are the ones mostly associated with country music. They enable a player to have multiple open tunings at their fingertips, and the pedal versions allow for 1 or 2 strings to have their pitch shifted. I think the way it goes is that since many country songs are in G or C, the pedal steel is set up to play in those keys, with the pedal shifts enabling new chords that still fit into those scales. Again, not my area of expertise.
*There were Spanish-guitar shaped Lap guitars made back then, too, like Gibson’s Roy Smeck Stage Deluxe. They didn’t have frets, but the marks were there with inlaid plastic. They came with wider necks vs. Spanish, too. They are loved by vintage players now, who find them and convert the necks to Spanish style play. Jackson Browne is a huge fan, as is Jeff Bridges who used one in that movie he made about being a broken-down country singer.