Boxing Day shopping with Mom = AWESOME!!

I got a new guitar today, it’s sweet. It’s not a regular style guitar it’s an electric “Hawaiian Style” guitar, also known as the “lap steel” guitar. It looks like this:


I’m a complete beginner in this type of guitar which is played by laying flat on your lap and manipulating the tone with a steel bar slide which you move up and down the neck. It’s called Hawaiian style because it was first used in Hawaii (duh) when this dude was walking down the train tracks with his guitar and picked up a loose bolt and used it slide around on the guitar strings.

There are several people famous for being slide guitar players, Blind Willie Johnson, Elmore James, Bonnie Raitt, Tony Furtado, to rattle of my favorites, but really no one famous for the lap steel. In fact I’ve only see two people ever play it, the front man from String Cheese Incident which was not a memorable performance, and Ben Harper. I’ve seen Ben Harper before live, and he puts on a pretty good show, especially when he plays Midnight Rider on the lap steel.