Chords for Breedlove Custom Lap-Steel Demo from Peghead Nation

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_ _ Hi, I'm Ed Gerhart, and this instrument here is a very unique instrument.
It's based on the old Weissenborn Hawaiian guitars from the 1920s.
This was made by Jason Bowerman back when he was with Breedlove Guitars.
Normally a Weissenborn is made from koa wood, Hawaiian koa.
This one is made from myrtle wood from the Pacific Northwest.
It's an absolutely spectacular wood, and it makes for a great Weissenborn.
You can see the sides and the back and the top are all very highly figured.
It's bound in American walnut.
This is an all-American woods guitar, actually.
The binding is walnut.
[G] The bridge and the fingerboard or fretboard are walnut.
As you can see, this has partial frets on the bass side.
And on some of my tunes, I'll do something where I'm barring, for example, with the slide,
and using my little finger to fret a note behind the slide.
_ _ _ [C] _ [G] There's a couple of tunes, Shallow Brown, for example, on my live album on House of
Guitars, and a tune called Homage, which is on my live record that used that sort of [C] partial fretting technique.
I haven't heard anybody else doing that, although I'm sure it's been done somewhere.
The Weissenborn has a Fishman Neo-D humbucker in the sound hole.
It's similar to many of your magnetic pickups.
I really like the way the Fishman sounds.
The lows and the highs are exactly right, and the midrange is nice and round, but it's stiff enough.
It doesn't get mushy at all, like some magnetic pickups.
So I can carry a melody without really worrying about it sounding mushy or getting indistinct.
It's a very clear-sounding pickup.
Normally, I plug the output of this into a Fishman Pro Platinum DI.
I've had the same one for about a million years now, and it's never let me down.
It's saved my butt multiple times, and the Weissenborn sounds really great through it.
As you can see, the action on the Weissenborn, the strings are very high off of the fingerboard.
You can't play this like a normal guitar.
Well, you could if you had a Frankenstein hand.
_ It's made to be played with this, which is called a steel, or a steel bar.
That's why they call it steel guitar.
The Weissenborn is one of the early examples of a steel guitar. _
_ _ _ [G] _ There's all kinds of great bar techniques that we don't have enough time to get into
here, but playing full chords, _ you can play [A] partial bars.
[Am] Just borrowing the bottom three strings, [F] bottom four strings.
[G] _ _
[D] _ _ _ [Am] _ _ [C] _
_ One of the wonderful things that a lot of Hawaiian players, and steel guitar players
in general do, is to play harmonics on the slide.
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_ [G] _ _ [C] _ [D] A Weissenborn is a lot of fun to play.
They have a remarkable projection, partly because they're so thin, and they're sitting
in your lap, just kind of screaming up into your face.
_ They have an incredible volume.
Because the neck is hollow and square, you get an extra bit of mid-range penetration,
I call it.
_ There's something about a Weissenborn, it's like there's a broken heart in every one.
They're just a very compelling sound.
It's nice to see so much interest in Weissenborn guitars out there, and a lot of makers are
making some really great ones.
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