Pedal Steel Guitar - Melvin Duffy - UK Player

We caught up with Melvin in between touring with First Aid Kit, down at Real World studios. Here are a few clips of him playing.
Melvin has been playing as a professional musician for 30 years. He is based in the UK, but has played in many other countries around the world. His first instrument is the Pedal Steel, but he also plays Electric Guitar, Acoustic Guitar, Dobro, Lap Steel, National, Weissenborn. contact@melvinduffy.com
http://melvinduffy.com/index.html

Weissenborn or H. Weissenborn is a brand of lap slide guitar manufactured by Hermann Weissenborn in Los Angeles in the 1920s and 1930s.
These instruments are now highly sought after, and form the base for most non-resonator acoustic lap steel guitars currently produced. It is estimated that fewer than 5,000 original instruments were produced, and it is unknown how many now survive. The signature feature of Weissenborn guitars is the hollow neck, effectively a highly adapted body chamber that runs the entire length of the body, making conventional playing completely impossible.
The name Weissenborn is now commonly used to describe this style of instrument in general, with H. Weissenborn and modern factory or luthier reproductions being referred to as Weissenborn or Weissenborn-style guitars.

The Dobro is a particular brand of resonator guitar. The Dobro was originally made by the Dopyera brothers when they formed the Dobro Manufacturing Company. Their design, with a single inverted resonator, was introduced in competition to the patented Tricone and biscuit designs produced by the National String Instrument Corporation. The Dobro name appeared on other instruments, notably electric lap-steel guitars and solid-body electric guitars and on other resonator instruments such as Safari resonator mandolins.

The pedal steel guitar is a type of electric steel guitar that is built on legs or a stand and is fitted with foot pedals which adjust the sound of the instrument. Like other electric guitars, the musical instrument produces sound by the vibration of its strings which are converted by magnetic pickup connected to an amplifier.
Pedal steels may have one or two "necks" that typically have 10 strings each, but may have as many as 14. Unlike most other guitars, pedal steel guitars have reference lines on the fretboard where frets would be, but no actual frets. The player changes the pitch of one or more strings by sliding a metal bar (a steel) from one position to another while plucking the strings with the other hand, or vibrating them with a mechanical device. Pedal steels are typically plucked with a thumb pick and fingers, or two or three fingerpicks.
The distinctive feature of pedal steel guitars are the namesake pedals as well as knee levers which affect the pitch of the instrument. The pedals are mounted on a cross bar below the body and the knee levers extend from the bottom of the guitar's body and stretch or slacken the strings to change pitch as the guitar is played. The action of the pedals may either be fixed, or may be configurable by the player to select which strings the pedals affect. While there are some fairly standard pedal assignments, many advanced players devise their own setups, called copedents. The range of copedents that can be set up varies considerably from guitar to guitar. Aftermarket modifications to make additional copedents possible are common.
The pedal steel evolved from the console steel guitar and lap steel guitar. Like the console steel, a pedal steel may have multiple necks, but the pedals make even a single-neck pedal steel a far more versatile instrument than any multiple-neck console steel.

dobro,pedal steel,lap steel,melvin duffy,Weissenborn,slide guitar,national guitar,first aid kit,her,robbie williams,elkie brooks,rod taylor,queen,paul young,Los Pacaminos,jamie moses,chris differed,mike scott,the waterboys,tina turner,joules holland,ub40,kt tunstall,joe cocker,uk slide player,uk steel pedal,Amaral,ian mcnabb,Uriah Heep,
Melvin Duffy - Pedal steel guitar