What kind of pickup works best for a lap steel?

[Rob DiStefano]

Love the non-pedal steels since first hearing S&J's "Sleepwalk". Love the C6 tuning, perhaps the best to start off learning lap steel. Get a good tone bar, a scalloped one, not a "steely dan" one, as the former will allow for a solid grasp and keep finger off the strings for notes and on the strings for damping. Tone bar length is also kinda important, not short and not too long. Heavy bars help, at least for me. This is all kinda trial and error, with lotsa errors sometimes.

Steel guitar playing is kinda the opposite of fretted guitar playing in that with steel, yer right hand does the "fretting" by plucking the appropriate strings that make chords. Choosing a tuning that allows getting the chords required for a specific tune without resorting to bar slants is interesting.

I've been experimenting with P90 "family" pickups and built almost a dozen for testing purposes, all with rod mags and P90 flatware, so these are "AR90" pickups ("Alnico Rod" magnets as opposed to flat bar magnets). Varying the mag height can vary the results from a squashed fat P90 coil to a skinny vertical Tele bridge coil. String spacing also matters and most P90 flatware is 50mm, which is fine, but Jazzmaster flatware allows a bit wider at 52mm - I want to try those too.

I have an AR90 in a china lap steel, 42 over A5 w/10000 turns, 23" scale, tuned C6, and so far I like the tone when plucked at the bridge and mid board (S&J tones). I'll be building a board lap steel in the coming weeks with a "Doozie scale" of 25-1/2" which is better suited to slack key tunings like openD (DADF#AD) which doesn't work well with the shorter 21" to 23" scales due to the poor string tension.

Doozies are SO nice, better yet when the player is exceptionally good ...

Duesenberg Alamo ...



Duesenber Fairytale with Lollar String Through bridge pickup ...

 

[Newbcaster]

So according to Ge Smith, his theory is thebold fender lapstees grew in to a Tele. Same pickup.

I'd just build a Tele with high action and don't bother to radius the fretboard.

Find a fat Tele pickup, something with alnico 2 magnets, 1/4inch ones. Overwound, possibly enough to coil tap it.

Put a fat sounding humbucker at the neck like a really hot Hotrail.

Fat blown gob of glass and you are set.

 

[Rob DiStefano]

In a perfect world, all 194x to 1964 Leo Fender pickups are quite the same, which they aren't, not by a factual long shot. And therein lies an issue of tone - too low a wind and twang becomes shrill along with reduced output, too high a wind and the magic Fender twang tone is gone as too much midrange is exhibited.

As to lap steels and Teles, a newbie to steel is better off with a real lap steel short scale in C6.