Brass Rail guitars

[connie_mack]

hi folks,
the first time i heard about the brass rail guitars i knew where semie was coming from. why? cause i am first and foremost, a pedal steel guitarist. one who has worked on my own guitars and given considerable thought to their construction. now, jump back a bit and think about where semie worked for a while. bigsby. the pre-eminent steel guitar factory in the world. many consider them to still be the finest ever made. many of the early breakthroughs in pedal steel technology(if you wanna call it that) came from the bigsby factory. the very bigsby tailpieces that moseley copied used the idea of having the strings slide over rollers, by then, and now a standard part of the pedal steel guitar. if bigsby had switched to high volume production of steel guitars, the shobud, msa, and emmons companies might never have had to start up in the first place to keep up with the demand. the late 50's and early 60's saw an unbelievable advancement in steel building theory and tuning, similar to our own present technology industry with new ideas coming out month to month and everyone scrambling to catch up. the idea of sustain built into the instrument was firmly established in the steel world by the mid 60's. it seems there were many ideas as to how to acheive this end with the winner being the emmons(at least in hindsite). with that said, it's pretty obvious what circle semie himself traveled in and i would suspect he was having conversations with either steel players or steel builders about the sustain that existed in steel guitars. i would be curious to hear how this bears out in the moseley book that i keep hearing about here on the forum. from a theoretical point of view it seems that to have that rail go all the way through would have been the ticket though......

well, i suppose this is all speculation on my part. but i just had to give my two cents.

feel free to tell me to shut up anytime.....

[Veenture]

... the idea of sustain built into the instrument was firmly established in the steel world by the mid 60's. it seems there were many ideas as to how to acheive this end with the winner being the emmons(at least in hindsite). with that said, it's pretty obvious what circle semie himself traveled in and i would suspect he was having conversations with either steel players or steel builders about the sustain that existed in steel guitars.

I like your "two cents" connie_mack and although I LOVE the sound of a steel guitar I know nothing of the instrument itself. Are you saying a brass rail (or rails) were being incorporated into Emmons (or others) steel guitars at the time? Very intriguing, this.
BTW you mention a "moseley book"...is there one? (...or do you mean The Ventures' book?)

[connie_mack]

hi veenture.
no there were no brass rails going through a steel guitar but what was going on was that the builders were understanding that if you created an instrument that gave an uninterupted platform for resonance to take place, then you could extend the sustain. you have to remember that the steel guitar has alot of metal in it(darn things weigh about 60 to 80 lbs). by having the parts be able to conduct that resonance, sustain is lengthened. trying to figure exactly why this works is the heart of the matter. one of the steels i have is a dekely, another inovator like moseley. the dekely uses almost an entire metal body to the guitar and boy does it have sustain. the emmons guitar worked so well in this respect because all the push/pull rods underneath made a connection with the metal end plates and changer and tuners making a full circuit, if you will. the necks on most steel guitars are cast aluminum. i'm not sure but i think the emmons was the first to cover the maple body in formica(another sustain enhancing technique). the brass rail connects all the frets in a similar way as i was describing. that's where i see the problem with his design, had the rail run straight through to the bridge(while still allowing for movement of different materials at different rates) i think the sustain would've been even better by creating a full resonance circuit.

i can't tell, but does the rail, in some way, connect with the tuners. are they touching? and no, it's not enough to just have the strings be the connection to the circuit.

sorry this is kind of rambling. it's hard to describe how a pedal steel guitar works. they are indeed engineering marvels. i've been trying to figure out how to improve the design in my head for the last two years and it's a mindf%^&k. i should post a picture of what the bottom looks like sometime.

the moseley book...seems i've read somewhere on the forum about one of his kids writing a book. did i get that wrong? i know about the ventures book.

[dorkrockrecords]

connie_mack:

Although your steel guitar observations are interesting, I think they are simply coincidences. The Brass Rail was not unique in its evolution; it came out of the very same design concepts that produced its contemporaries Travis Bean, SD Curlee, Bunker, Gittler and a number of other very 1970s axes. Necks became set deeper, bodies became denser, brass aftermarket parts became the vogue, and even mainstream producers like Gibson began slapping brass nuts on everything short of big jazz boxes.

[connie_mack]

were any of those other companies run by anyone who also worked at a steel guitar manufacturer?

[dorkrockrecords]

Well, both Paul Bigsby and Travis Bean were motorcycle guys, so by your logic both of their theories on instrument design could have originated with the internal combustion engine.

[Dennisthe Menace]

Well, both Paul Bigsby and Travis Bean were motorcycle guys, so by your logic both of their theories on instrument design could have originated with the internal combustion engine.

OK, let's add more Premium Fuel to the Fire
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=w ... brIOxWjxAA

[Veenture]

...very thought-provoking -all this latest insight and the topic hitting on an intellectual level now guys!
Thank you very much connie_mack, Adam, Dennis and others.

Off topic for a sec but may I just say at this point how very much I enjoy my album "SUITE STEEL" …so much so that I copied my 1970 vinyl album onto CDR.


(sorry about the typo error on Sneaky Pete Kleinow's name) Thanks, Paul

[connie_mack]

Well, both Paul Bigsby and Travis Bean were motorcycle guys, so by your logic both of their theories on instrument design could have originated with the internal combustion engine.

well docrock,
you are certainly entitled to your opinion, but i based my observation on two very significant pieces of information. one that moseley worked for bigsby, THE leading pedal steel guitar manufacturer in the world at the time. two, that moseley, on his own guitars, used a bridge with rollers for the tremolo arm, which is a dead giveaway to pedal steel guitar manufacture.

these are facts. i based my conclusion on facts. and i stated why. please be more specific why my conclusion is faulty. i would appreciate a more specific reason than that my logic is flawed because of motorcycles or combustion engines or that it's just a coincidence. how about some of the same design concepts produced by the other manufacturers that you mentioned. what are they, that make your argument hold water? i'm not being facetious here, but am trying to draw a larger picture. a brass rail running down the center of a guitar neck with the stated purpose of enhancing sustain seems to me to be magnitudes different from using brass knobs or nuts on other parts of the guitar.

[dorkrockrecords]

well, i suppose this is all speculation on my part. but i just had to give my two cents.

feel free to tell me to shut up anytime.....

I love how your pedal-steel-centric view of the universe has just jumped the shark from speculation to fact. You made a very specific conjecture that the Mosrite Brass Rail guitar was a direct descendant of the pedal steel based on evidence that A) Mosrite guitars use roller bridges, and B) pedal steels do not require adjustable truss rods because they are essentially sewing machines with strings. However, the Brass Rail does not utilize a roller bridge, and I have yet to see an analog to inlaying a hunk of brass in the neck of a guitar in the pedal steel world.

Although Semie was resigned primarily to inlays and pickguards under Bigsby, if you wanted to quote his general curiosity with the pedal steel you could have easily referenced Semie's failed experiments with B-benders, reverse body vibratos, body mounted volume pedals and bicycle cable actuated pedal steel mechanisms on conventional guitars (which would have been a novel and thoughtful discussion), but your apparent raging hard-on for pedal steels has you drawing misguided bloodlines to a specific instrument that has no evident pedal steel DNA in it.

So, I think it's about that time.