Category Archives: Kamelmauz

This is the ‘well’ the top part of a changer for a Fender 400 pedal steel guitar fits into.

And therein lies a story, a story I will summarize.

I bought a Fender 400 pedal steel guitar in May. However, in July I was scanning various craigslist and happened upon a dude who had a “closet special” Fender 400 a few road hours away. It came with a somewhat hard-to-believe tale: it was a gift in 1970 and the guitar went back into the closet shortly thereafter.

Please mama, don’t put tape on your boy’s guitar.

I drove down, learned I was the only serious buyer (against the usual craigslist scammers,) and bought it. It came with a case, manual, picks and bar. And, much to my surprise, a couple of knee levers—one disassembled, and the other assembled but non-functional. I gave the rig a look-see. Hmmm, closet maybe, but closet subject to barn dust, judging from the fine brown coating on the otherwise pristeen case.

The underside of the guitar was not pretty.

But, lo-and-behold, there was a crosspiece, and a taped-together wooden knee lever, and, a single raise-or-lower rodded changer loop.

I did some quick, ridiculous calculatin’. I already have a well traveled in the past, new-to-me, and aces Fender 400. It is identical to the new candidate I’m staring at. Buy it? So, I figured I end up with a case once I sell my other steel guitar. Good. Deal.

Only when I’m back at the shack do I realize, after a more leisurely inspection, that I’ve also bought the experience and learning moment too. I’m going to have to take the guitar apart and dis-assemble the changer, clean all the parts, reassemble, and, hope to God, I’ve got a second ‘player’ equal to the first.

Two hours were spent taking it apart, two hours were spent cleaning the parts, and, finally, about three hours were spent putting it back together. Incidentally, alkaline carpet spot cleaner–Folex–and water is good solution for soaking parts. Hardest part was figuring out what tools I needed to stretch the return springs, then hold this stretch, and then slip one end over the tab. It was a bear until I figured out how to do it, but otherwise the crude mechanism goes back together easily.

In the small world of Fender 400 pedal steel guitars, discovering a number 5 on masking tape in the panhead cavity is a meaningless surprise. My modestly informed guess is that both my guitars are most likely candidates for the end of the Fender 8 string cabled steel’s run, say 1970-1974. Basically, in every respect, the two 400′s are identical. They could have been made on the same day, or six or seven years apart.

One great advantage of having the changer and pulley and cranks completely in pieces was that this afforded me the opportunity to surgically apply Tri-flow lubricant to the changer, and clean and lubricate the pulley discs and pedal cranks and all the moving parts.

Next I used acetone to clean the chromed parts and Goo Gone to remove the sticky residue from the surgical tape the youthful original owner used to mark the fret positions. The sticky part came off, but if you stick your nose up close, you’d see that the tape’s grit literally was fossilized.

I was very careful not to lose any wood screws. springs, or tuning screws. The only mistake I made was to erase the photos I took of each part—after I had cleaned all the parts.

Then came the moment of truth. Slapped 8 strings from a C6 set on it. Ran it into the Peterson Strobe software, tuned strings and pedals to my ‘Open E sort o’ 9th,’ and got to slidin’. I figured I’d break in the new set and break my heart, or not, over about a week or so.

Verdict? First, I put it back together correctly. The six raises raised and the two lowers lowered. Second, would it stay in tune? Sure. Just like the other one, every now and then it needs the pedal tuning tweaked, but the main tuning holds like a champ.

Cherry!

The biggest delight was A-B-ing the two identical guitars. The Fender jazzmaster pick-up on the closet/barn special is a bit more live; say 15% than the same pickup on the other guitar. The action is very close to the same for each guitar. I use the short pedal throws, and the spiffier guitar is just a little bit quieter with respect to the mechanical sound effects which go along with playing. Cosmetically, the second “barn” guitar is, in my weird world, an A- and the first is a solid B.

Throw in the minty case makes it all a great deal. Yet, only is it so because I took the barn special apart and cleaned up and rebuilt the mechanism. And, it shines.

But, I don’t need two!

Two identical Fender 400 pedal steel guitars - probably 35-40 years old

I did something audacious (or drug addled,) in the summer of 1972. I ordered a Fender 400 pedal steel guitar from DeArango Music in Cleveland Heights, my hometown. I was told I’d have to wait several months. I don’t remember the price, but I vaguely recollect it was about $400. I had saved up and also had the benefit of a graduation gift or two. My best friend Jamie told me that “with your talent you’ll learn how to play it in a year or two.” Such as my talent was at the time, my musical talent was–as yet–unexpressed and tending to nil. (Well, in most respects it still does tend this way.) But he and me had big time cowpie-in-the-sky rock band visions.

As it happened, the Fender never arrived. DeArango may have sold it out from under me. Who knows. I was offered a Sho-Bud Maverick off the floor, a starter pedal steel, and a Fender Twin Reverb amp as a package for a slight bump in price. I jumped on it.

The whole thing was nutty. I bought an OMI dobro a year later. A friend gave me a wreck of a National wooden body acoustic lap guitar. Over the 18 months, before moving to Vermont, I may have logged 250 hours, mostly on the dobro, trying to jumpstart even beginning to learn how to play. (I had at the time ‘higher’ priorities-literally.) The Maverick wouldn’t stay in tune, so it quickly became an object of my disaffection, or, better, rationalizing; and sat in a corner all pretty and ignored.

In 1975, while living in Maine and having exhausted my monies, I sold the maverick and amp for $300. (Oh…just a new white face Twin amp!) I rarely touched the other guitars after that point, and gave both to the fine Vermont musician Michael Corn in 1991.

Then, 30 years later, I hatched another nutty idea. I wanted to fashion some of my distinctive, naive electro world hed music and use as appropriated source the music of north Africa and the Sahel styled into ambient sound worlds. Why? Pentatonic raptures; for me, entrancing and proto-bluez like. Nutty, but absolutely aimed at only my own satisfactions-and, it doesn’t take much.

Needed a guitar, to whack pentatonic vamps on. Then I had a brainstorm: why not steel guitar? I started tracking eBay. Soon enough, I won an auction for a new Fouke Indy Rail. Nice. Open E. Sweet all-aluminum axe.

I have to confess, 4 years later, I have about 1,000 hours into it. Still, I discovered something fantastic: a lap steel is a fine sound device for running through synth patches and effects chains. The IndyRail has terrific sustain and so I started recording my playing, or sound sourcing, and came up with lots of ambient and drone and pentatonic goodness. So much so, that I added a second lap steel, handmade by Allen Melbert, to experiment with straight pentatonic tunings. Now I’ve dedicated a cheapo Rondo lap steel to my crazy fever dream.

Then I began to think of how neat it would be to work a pentatonic tuning on a pedal steel guitar. (…such a charlatan I am!) Only problem was, after a little research, it became clear that a modern 10 string pedal steel guitar in mechanical terms was not going to be amenable to naive experimentation. Student models couldn’t have their set-ups (string and pedal changes,) altered, and professional models could, but they cost a lot of money and even then, changing to exotic set-ups wasn’t, generally, their forte.

Then, much to my surprise, I discovered that the old Fender 400 fit the bill for a ridiculous reason: it’s archaic cable-driven pedal-and-changer mechanism could be changed in minutes. Understand that Fender stopped making this particular “cabled” steel guitar right around the time I ordered it, 1972. Where modern pedal steels are marvels of engineering, the old cable Fenders were known as crude affairs that had retained their simplistic mechanics against the tide of Sho-Buds and Emmons innovations. Most common qualification: the Fenders were clunkers.

But…you…see, this pedal steel that didn’t show up in 1972 was the one steel that fit my feverish requirements. I began to regularly scan eBay. Starting last winter, Fender 400′s seemed to hit the auction block weekly, several hit the buy section of the invaluable Pedal Steel Guitar forum, but I was outbid or the guitar/seller didn’t pass the minimal smell test. I wanted a player, not a project.

Then in May a seeming player hit eBay. I raised my purchase price bar up a bit and placed the winning bid on an in-state 400.

Pedal Steel connected to MacBook; signal chain is: Guitar Rig Mobil I/O through Core Audio to DSP-Quattro Pro, then, via DSP-QP’s virtual board lots of effects, or, directly plugged as a sound source into Native Instruments Absynth. More skinny.

Drove down to southern Ohio and completed the deal. No case. I put the body of the guitar on the back seat and the pedal rack on the floor of my Honda, and smiled all the way on the 3 hour return trip.

Over the last month I experimented with a straight pentatonic tuning in D (D-E-G-A-B-D-E-B) wrangled from the inherited set of strings. Because such a tuning provides the equivalent of a melodic progression up and down the strings at a single fret, it became clear that the pedals weren’t very useful for my purposes, and that my weird vision was, well, weird with respect to the layout of an 8 string pedal steel guitar.

Fortunately there is a world class resource on the web to mine, The Pedal Steel Guitar Forum, and there is also a Fender oriented resource run by the Fender cable steel guy, Jim Sliff. Between the two, I captured a mountain of tuning information. Eventually i settled on a modification by Doggett/Quasar

Firstly, this is a low tuning, with a 0.066 bass string anchoring the tuning in the low B. Fundamentally, this is an E Major tuning, like the lap steel I’ve got the most time on. Also, this tuning gives me one ‘almost’ run of the D pentatonics, some other stuff I’m scoping out.

Yet, in the main, this is major power chord affair with a little bit of E9 flavor on strings 2 to 6. I was pleased that I could remember a few licks and grips from back in my pathetic day; that day now drawn forward into a pathetic, and gratifying present!

As it turned out, and luckily enough, this darn 400 was a player. It stays in tune, has that distinctive Fender sound, and it didn’t need a thing. I gave the changer a Tri-Flow treatment, and wiped the cables with WD40 and that was it.

Kamelmauz's steel rig