FEEL LIKE STEEL

Finally finished coming up with a steel guitar part to Brad's tune "Feel Like Hell." I think I've gone through 3 or 4 different approaches to that tune. First I tried a gimmicky fast tremolo part--didn't work. Then I tried a minimal guitar part played on just two strings for the entire song--nope.

Then Brad mentioned that he thought steel guitar would be good for the song. I didn't want to clutter up the tune too much, so I tried to do just sort of improvised meandering within each chord as it came by. I was okay with the way some of those came out, but overall it kinda sucked.

So I eventually thought, "I am just gonna have to bear down and grind out an actual part to this song." So I looped the various sections over and over (and over) and just played with all kinds of variations--playing "out," playing "in," major 7th type of stuff, more country, less country, more mellow, less mellow...to tell you the truth, I was afraid I'd never come up with anything good.

Then for some reason, I started fooling around with open strings against moving tones. I think what I was trying to do was figure out the best way to play "El Camino" in C6 tuning so that I could change my "El Camino neck" out of low, loose G6 and put that in a useful, inspirational tuning.

Anyway, I realized that you can get a lot of pedal-steel sounding stuff on the lap steel using open strings. I'm sure I may have run across that before, but I go through phases with the steel guitar--I study it intensely for a while, learn some positions and some concepts, and then forget about half of them when I have to stop focusing on the steel and do something else for a while.

Anyway, the part I came up with is practically a study in open strings with "fretted" tones. I was pretty pleased with the way it came out. I did two takes last night and I did the solo (Brad whistled the melody for the solo on his demo and wanted my to try to play that) 3 times. And my right index and middle fingers "felt like hell" because I've decided once and for all to stop using finger picks (I want to use them, but they don't feel natural to me and I feel inhibited by them).

But I think I split the difference between country and non-country fairly well in this part--the chorus part is my attempt at doing a Don Rich Buckaroos type of thing, and the verses are more trying to do something ear-catching rather than trying to fit a genre, if that makes any friggin' sense...

Of course, Brad hasn't heard the whole thing yet, so what you end up hearing may be totally different from what I'm describing right now...