With 225 photos and 40 line drawings, Koch shows how to make two different lap steel guitars in simple, easy-to-follow steps. He even explains how to make a guitar pickup using the world's simplest pickup winder. (Music)

• Shows how to build cigar box guitars and other amazing musical instruments made from found items. • Step-by-step instructions and color photographs. • Background on the history of cigar box guitars and the golden age of blues and jazz. • Introduction from the New Orleans Museum of Jazz. • Recognized as the creator of the modern cigar box guitar movement and known as the “King of the Cigar Box Guitar,” this author is an active roots music performer with a ready audience of fans on social media.

(Instructional). The Hal Leonard Lap Steel Guitar Method is designed for anyone just learning to play the six-string lap steel guitar. This comprehensive and easy-to-use beginner's guide by country music veteran Johnie Helms includes many fun songs and hot licks to learn and play. The accompanying audio features 95 demonstration and play along tracks. Topics include tunings, chords, scales, key positions, right- and left-hand techniques, vibrato, string pulls, slants, music reading, and much more!

Made famous by the legendary Jerry Byrd, the C6 tuning [CEGACE] for the non- pedal lap steel guitar has many advantages due to its versatility. The tuning isespecially useful in playing two and three-string chord combinations and for easy single-string passages. Patience, dedication and many hours of practice areneeded to perfect the "slant" bar positions, especially the reverse slants, but the end result is well worth the effort. This excellent text, written by Steel Guitarand Country Music Hall of Fame member DeWitt Scott, is written in standard notation and tablature. Audio download available online.

This book is an excellent introduction to one of America's most quintessential instruments, the pedal steel. The first part of the book covers the skills required to play the instrument, including technique for the pedals and knee levers, bar control, and picking. The second half includes songs and licks that illustrate the full spectrum of the pedal steel's capabilities. Exercises and songs are presented in tablature and standard notation. The book comes with accompanying audio and video download available online, including play-along tracks

“A hot-rod joy ride through mid-20th-century American history” (The New York Times Book Review), this one-of-a-kind narrative masterfully recreates the rivalry between the two men who innovated the electric guitar’s amplified sound—Leo Fender and Les Paul—and their intense competition to convince rock stars like the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, and Eric Clapton to play the instruments they built. In the years after World War II, music was evolving from big-band jazz into rock ’n’ roll—and these louder styles demanded revolutionary instruments. When Leo Fender’s tiny firm marketed the first solid-body electric guitar, the Esquire, musicians immediately saw its appeal. Not to be out-maneuvered, Gibson, the largest guitar manufacturer, raced to build a competitive product. The company designed an “axe” that would make Fender’s Esquire look cheap and convinced Les Paul—whose endorsement Leo Fender had sought—to put his name on it. Thus was born the guitar world’s most heated rivalry: Gibson versus Fender, Les versus Leo. While Fender was a quiet, half-blind, self-taught radio repairman, Paul was a brilliant but headstrong pop star and guitarist who spent years toying with new musical technologies. Their contest turned into an arms race as the most inventive musicians of the 1950s and 1960s—including bluesman Muddy Waters, rocker Buddy Holly, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Eric Clapton—adopted one maker’s guitar or another. By 1969 it was clear that these new electric instruments had launched music into a radical new age, empowering artists with a vibrancy and volume never before attainable. In “an excellent dual portrait” (The Wall Street Journal), Ian S. Port tells the full story in The Birth of Loud, offering “spot-on human characterizations, and erotic paeans to the bodies of guitars” (The Atlantic). “The story of these instruments is the story of America in the postwar era: loud, cocky, brash, aggressively new” (The Washington Post).

This book explains step by step, with over 1800 photos and more than 600 illustrations how to layout and build your own electric guitar. Build an entire guitar in a small room on a homemade multifunctional work table. Only a router and some easy-to-make jigs are required to prepare the wood.