Lloyd Green

On the advice of Frank Carter, I recently watched the video of Paul Franklin’s conversation with Lloyd Green. There’s a great section in the first part around 35-40 minutes in, where they talk about that heady time from the 60s to mid 70s when Country Music was great and pedal steel was a big part of it. It was also the time when there was a lot of development and innovation in the instrument.

PSG players, when recording, did what they could to support the song of course, but there was also a lot in the way of development of different styles, born of individual players' styles; it was a self feeding process.

Part of the conversation turned to that common debate: is it better to try out different changes and what licks and ideas may come from them or is it better to settle in on one tuning and look for all of the possibilities in it.

Later, Lloyd talks about his decision to not lower his fourth string (a standard change that nearly everyone uses) and how it led to certain sounds, playing different strings allowing for certain interactions of vibrations. This relates to the question of how the steel advanced after the addition of pedals which allowed changes that used to be done with bar slants, which they also discuss. The question of whether pedals and levers can make people lazy about technique came up. It's all a fascinating discussion from these two greats.

This led me to think again about some of the issues facing this project. I expect there will be some people who will complain about the design of the OnePSG. because they believe it will somehow take some of the innovation out of playing, some of the discovery, some of the humanness.

I prefer to think of the redesign as a way to expand possibilities, not to limit them. I suppose someone could program all kinds of pedal/lever changes to achieve all kinds of sounds without moving the bar. But of course that laziness is more or less available right now to every player of the traditional PSG, just with more work.

So what do I think this revolution in the design of the PSG will achieve?

Of course it will be possible to change tunings quickly, even in the middle of a song. But more importantly it will be possible to experiment with lots of changes that would have been too much work (or not even physically possible). For example, if you would like to try out Lloyd Green's tuning without the fourth string lower and explore what can come of it, how it might affect your playing, it'll be very easy to program that change ... in seconds ... and, just as importantly, easy to change back.

As some have speculated, this might bring new, younger players to to the PSG. That might in turn help to save the PSG from extinction. Good questions. Stay tuned.