Vega console guitar from the 1930s

guitarz.blogspot.com:

This 8-string Vega console guitar (basically a lap steel with legs!) has more than a touch of the Art Deco about it, with decorative chrome accents and bakelite knobs. The feature that I find most intriguing, though, is the tuning apparatus. I've not seen anything quite like that on a guitar before. Compact, it isn't!

The five bakelite-topped tone controls are labelled "Contra", "Bass", "Normal", "Treble" and "High".

A fascinating instrument; I'm sure you could make a whole blog on the subject of slide guitars alone. Unfortunately I know precious little about them.

G L Wilson

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

Dobro Model 66 from the 1930s

guitarz.blogspot.com:

This highly decorated 1930-era Dobro Model 66 seems to be a very appropriate guitar to show during this festive season. It's a wooden-bodied resonator guitar with a square neck for lap steel playing. The decorative design has been applied through the process of sandblasting. The body would have been made from mahogany plywood with a neck of mahogany and an ebonized (i.e. artificially blackened) rosewood fingerboard. In its day this would have been Dobro's top of the line instrument, and was also available as a roundneck guitar for what we nowadays consider to be the more conventional "Spanish" style of playing.

G L Wilson

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 9th year!

Alvino Rey (and not to mention Stringy the talking steel guitar!)

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Here's an email from Alan:

Hello from Washington DC USA.

Two slick videos I wanted to tell you about featuring Alvino Rey - a steel guitarist popular from the '40s thru the '60s. One (see above) features "Stringy", a singing puppet fronting for a vocalist going through a Sonovox. Bands of the 1940s routinely did these early "music videos" that ran in movie theaters.

The fun starts around the 0:42 sec mark.

The second shows Alvino on the "King Family" TV show of the 1960s - a very safe, family-friendly music variety show of that era. What makes it cool is seeing Alvino slinging a state of the art Fender solid-body instead of a nice, dignified archtop jazzbox; almost a blasphemy on a "family" TV show such as this.

In black and white it's hard to tell what the actual color of this guitar is. Since TV of that era couldn't handle *pure* white (it would blow the picture out), I want to pretend it's a Lake Placid Blue, an Ivory, or some kinda yellow.

Enjoy.
-AP

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 9th year!

Home made aluminium lap steel

guitarz.blogspot.com:

This very simple instrument, made out of a piece of aluminium double glazing extrusion, is especially interesting to me as I just bought a Peavey Powerslide and I'm in the process of getting the hang of it. Not a piece of cake by any means.

The builder of this guitar (Airbrake 1 or Marscape 1, depending whether you find him on Flickr or Youtube) has further simplified the construction - and complicated the learning process - by leaving out the fret markers! Which makes his rather modest claim to not be able to play steel guitar even more remarkable. On his Flickr page, he says "I decided to fit 3 strips of tape to show the 5th fret position, the 12th and the 24th. I could have fitted more, but I wanted to try to develop my ear, so I would be able to automatically find the right notes. It takes some practice to do this!" Yeah, you don't say. Check out his not too shabby video. If I could coax something like this from my Powerslide, I'd be pretty pleased with myself.

David in Barcelona

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 9th year!

This Rickenbacker's got legs!

guitarz.blogspot.com:

This 1960 vintage Rickenbacker 100 Consolette steel guitar is one of a species that could be described as a "missing link". Console guitars - essentially lap steels with legs - evolved from the more usual kind of lap steels that you actually play with the guitar on your lap, and would later evolve further with the addition of pitch bending levers and pedals into the pedal steel guitar.

G L Wilson

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 9th year!

1939 Recording King Model D lap steel

guitarz.blogspot.com:
Whilst we're on a lap steel kick at the moment, I can't help showing you this utterly gorgeous Recording King Model D from 1939 currently being offered for sale on eBay. I particularly like the pear-shaped body, which has a mandolin-quality to the design.

Recording King was a brand name used by American department store Montgomery Ward's in the 1930s, with instruments being made by Gibson.

The brand name has since been revived by San Francisco-based AXL.

G L Wilson

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 9th year!

One-off "Juju" lap steel

guitarz.blogspot.com:
I don't know why we don't feature more lap steels on this blog, because some of the designs are really out there! This very distinctive one-off lap steel bearing the "Juju" name has been built around a huge slab of lacewood. As you can see the lacewood slab, although polished up, has been left in a rustic state showing the beauty of the wood.

Very strangely for a lap steel, the fingerboard seems to have actual frets rather than simple visual markers.

G L Wilson

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 9th year!

handmade lap steel guitar with multibender bridge

guitarz.blogspot.com

Check this astonishing handmade lap steel guitar - a creative and nice piece of craftsmanship, isn't it?

Though it pioneered the electrification of musical instruments in the early 1930s, lap steel guitar seems a conservative instrument because of the musical genres it's associated with - country, blue grass and old school blues (though it was created firstly to play hawaiian music if I'm not wrong) - so it might be surprising to see one with a elaborated design where usually you find rough simplicity.

This one has a Duesenberg multibender, a wooden P90 pickup, and a chambered body providing a richer sound than lap steel guitars often reduced to a neck. Usually I like chicken head knobs, but here they don't match - some art deco Duesenberg ones would fit better!

bertram

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 9th year!

John Paul Jones's Manson Custom Bass Lapsteel

guitarz.blogspot.com

Addendum to my previous Melobar post:

the first time I noticed a Melobar style lapsteel guitar was in a video of Them Crooked Vultures showing John Paul Jones playing a custom made (by Manson, hence the trademark embedded Kaoss pad) strap-on bass lapsteel (photo) - I actually wrote a post about them, but at the time I was more interested in Homme's Maton guitar and Jones's Manson bass mandolin!

I'm not a fan of Them Crooked Vultures' music but I must admit that they have a very good taste in instruments. Besides Jones's Manson lapsteel, we can see in this video Homme playing his MotorAve BelAir and Johannes who took over bass duty with a violin bass that looks like an original Höfner (couldn't see the brand but the headstock shape fits)(can't tell about Grohl's drums, this is out of my domain!).

bertram

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 9th year!

1930s Rickenbacker A-22 Frying Pan

guitarz.blogspot.com

No, not all the Rickenbacker Frying Pans - the vintagest amongst the vintage guitars - are safe in museums or bankers' collections, you can still find one on eBay!

For those you don't know it, this cast aluminium lap steel guitar with its characteristic horse shoe magnet pickup was created in 1931 - and is the first electric guitar in history.

Get down on your knees and adore, guitar lovers!

bertram

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 9th year!

Flyte-inspired lap steel, a.k.a. the KKK Hawaiian!

guitarz.blogspot.com:
Lately I've been looking through some of the lap steels and Hawaiian guitars being sold on eBay, becuase, let me tell you, there are some really wacky designs in this whole sub-group of our favourite instrument.

Look at this one. There are currently two sellers on eBay.co.uk selling a guitar like this (here and here). Both are using the same photos and have copied the same text from somewhere which very mysteriously claims that:

This guitar is made by an "official" overseas manufacturer for one of the biggest name-brand guitar companies (which I can not name here, per eBay's ebay rules).

I'm not aware of anything in the eBay rules that says you can't name the manufacturer of the goods you are selling, but I get the impression that this isn't really what the seller means. It's more likely a question of copyright infringement.

This lap steel guitar is obviously based on the now legendary Burns Flyte guitar, which is one of my personal all-time favourite designs. However, unlike the real deal, it does not look sculpted, elegant and classy. It looks flat and two-dimensional as if it had been cut out of a sheet of MDF (although apparently it's the ever-popular basswood) and the pointed headstock looks like it could be lethal.

Even more disturbingly, standing up like that in the photo, it resembles the silhouette of a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

Please don't tell me that this is genuine Burns products (if it was, why the secrecy over the name of the manufacturer?) because I'd hate to think they'd lower their standards so very much as to produce this abomination.

G L Wilson

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Wilder Davoli plexiglass lapsteel

guitarz.blogspot.com

Yes, Davoli like in Krundaal-Davoli, the company that issued Wandre's amazing guitars in the 60s. Wilder is an Italian music gear import company created by Davoli's son, usually distributing alternative brands like Eastwood or Trussart.

They also release a few instruments under Wilder's brand, such as this bizarre plexiglass lapsteel guitar. I'm very unfamiliar with this instrument (the only image of it I have is David Gilmour playing One of these days on the 80s-ish Pink Floyd tour I saw when young and fresh), but this one seems remarkable to me, maybe the high-tech impression of plexiglass is contradictory with the dusty image of blue-grass associated with the instrument...

(On the other hand, I'm a fan of electric hurdy-gurdy when used for jazz or experimental music!)

Bertram

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Magnatone Lap Steel Guitar

I think that on a casual glance you could be forgiven for not realising that this
Magnatone Lap Steel is even a guitar. It's one of the most un-guitar-like guitars I have ever seen.

Actually, I'd even question it being a lap steel. Even without having a headstock, it still appears to be quite a substantial piece of gear. Possibly it's supposed to have legs attached, as it looks too hefty to play on the lap.

Electro Artist Double Lap Steel

Now here's a whole area of the guitar world about which I know very little: lap steel guitars. Before we go any further, I must stress that I'm not talking about pedal steel guitars - that's a whole other field and a very complicated one with all their pedals and knee levers and so forth. It's a different instrument really.

The lap steel, however, most of us guitarists can relate to, even if it is foreign territory to many of us. It's still usually recognisably a guitar, albeit one that you play in a weird way. Occasionally I find myself looking at lap steels on eBay and thinking, "Yeah, I could play one of those. One of these days, I'll get one..."

I did experiment a while back with an old Teisco guitar on which I raised the nut, tuned to an open chord (D, I think, if I remember) and tried playing it lapstyle with a slide. It sounded interesting, but was much harder to play that I imagined it would be.

This Elektro Artist looks like a bit of a lapfull! I think I'd want to put legs on that, it's quite a behemoth! It's the lap steel equivalent of the doubleneck guitar, even though it doesn't have "necks" as such. But look at all that mother of toilet seat and 14 strings. Outrageous! The headstock (do they call them "headstocks" on lap steels?) is enormous.

I love looking at pictures of such guitars. They do not all look alike and there are some very interesting and original designs to be seen. Quite a few have an art deco feel to them and look like forgotten relics from the 1940s.

One of these days...

Harmos Lap Steel and Electric Guitars

	Harmos Lap Steel and Electric Guitars: The "21st Century carbon fibre space frame" adds innovative tonal resonance to your music (so it says on the website) supposedly by accentuating the overtones rather than absorbing them into a solid body as on most other guitars. I don't know about the science behind it but they certainly do look fantastic! Pictured to the left is the Americana lap steel guitar, and below is the new MATRAX electric guitar.