The Joy of Hawaiian Lap Steel Guitar

I treated myself over spring break and bought a Rogue RLS-1 Lap Steel Guitar.  At the risk of sounding like an advertisement, I got a good deal on it, and you get a lot for your money. It comes with a stand and a soft case that holds both the instrument and the legs for the stand. While there are a number of online reviews that complain that the stand is ‘shaky,’ I have no such problem with the instrument that I bought.

There dozens of ways to tune a lap steel guitar, with about half a dozen of them being common. I want to focus on a single tuning system so that I might be able to improvise more proficiently at some point. I’ve selected C6 tuning (C, E, G, A, C, E – bottom to top), as it is easy to get both major and minor chords by playing the bottom three or top three strings respectively.

However, before being able to improvise or write original music for the instrument, it would be wise to get some basic experience playing the it. I am focusing on learning Hawaiian lap steel guitar, as I am a long time fan of Hawaiian string music.  As I put it to my wife years ago, “it’s like a mini-vacation for your ears.”

I bought a copy of The Art of Hawaiian Steel Guitar by Stacy Phillips. It is a great book.  It starts with a couple of pages about the history of Hawaii. It then covers the history of Hawaiian music.  In particular it focuses on how traditional vocal styles can be heard in the later developed steel guitar stylings.

Phillips then moves on to common playing techniques in Hawaiian lap steel playing, along with an explanation of the tablature he uses in the rest of the book.  Tablature makes it much easier for a beginner to get started, because it is essentially a graph telling you where to put your fingers at what times.  However, tablature is fairly useless if you try to switch instruments, or as we will see later, tuning systems.  That being said, Phillips presents songs in a general order of increasing difficulty, and introduces each song noting what are the challenges to playing each.  He also gives a historical background of each song, and identifies notable recordings, including any that he has based his transcription from.

Unfortunately for me, Phillips has chosen to put most of the tunes in traditional open G tuning (G, B, D, G, B, D bottom to top), as I want to focus on C6 tuning, Thus, for every tune, I have to translate it into traditional musical notation, and then annotate it to indicate playing information, such as what fret number the slide should be at (indicated in Roman numerals), and what string number is played (indicated using Arabic numerals).  Thus far, I’ve been able to translate the first three songs from the book into C6 tuning. While I haven’t mastered any of these tunes yet, I am starting to make progress, and can imagine a time where I might start to get some of this to sound decent.