Tuning A440

[Ricky Davis]

This is great Ricky. Is there the same kind of method for the C6 tuning?

E9th Pedal steel tuning procedure

First you tune your "A" note to 440 then with
pedals down tune your "E" note to that "A" 440
note. Now you have the new "E" note reference to
"A" 440.
Tuning the open tuning.
Tune the other E note(4and8)
Tune the G#'s (3and6)to E
Tune the B's (5and10)to E
Tune the F#'s (1and7)to B
Tune the D# to B(2nd string)
Tuning the pedals and knee levers
Tune the A pedal(5and10) to the E note
Tune the B pedal(3and6)to the E note("A"440)
Tune the C pedal(4and5)to the A note
Tune E lower knee(4and8)to the B note
Tune E raise knee(4and8) to the A pedal
Tune D note(9th string) to and "A" note
Tune D# lower 1/2 tone to 9th string
Tune D# lower whole tone to A pedal
Top

I'm sorry Andy; I don't and never wrote one up for C6th. I currently don't own a C6 pedal steel neck; I only play my E9 Sho~Bud LDG for the money and C6th is actually called "The Two-week Notice Neck"...ah...ha.....LOL......
Ricky

[J D Sauser]

Hearing Big Bands tune chords in real time helped me understand how JI lives inside ET—and why pedal steel players have to manage both at once.

I’ve been up close to a Jazz/Swing Big Band twice.
Once was at The Baked Potato behind Hollywood, CA — a minuscule, world-renowned jazz club in Studio City. The place is so small that the band is right in your face, and I initially feared this was going to be nothing more than a very long night staring down a trombone bell.
Instead, the band played at a very low volume and used very modern, complex chords, which made it feel like the whole band was floating. What really struck me was that I could hear them tune each chord — all horns, one note each. That’s when I wondered: How do the players holding the root manage to stay at “440” while everyone else hones in on something smoother — closer to JI?
In Jazz that's super complex, because there is not just the pesky M3rd degree but Major 3rd intervals in between other degrees all over the place and they just cannot all be flattened a generic -11cents. (the reason I tune my pedaled C6th as near to ET as bearable because each adjustment towards JI just generates an avalanche of new problems with other pedal-lever combinations.)

The second time, I was actually sitting inside a Big Band during a rehearsal. It was loud, but the same thing happened — it felt like sitting on a cloud, arms crossed, just floating in near-JI heaven.

We control all our tones — the root and everything we hang onto it. Roots change from string to string… sometimes even to a pedaled string. (E9th’s A-pedaled JI-flattened C#, tuned as the major 3rd to A with A&B down — effectively an A6th — suddenly becomes the root of a C# major chord, with the E-to-F lever added, which is a typically problematic one that comes to mind.)

It’s up to us to bring all that “salad” of tuned and detuned tones together and blend with the rest of the band — which is usually made up of mostly ET-tuned instruments that are often not perfectly in tune anyway.
We have do that by playing slightly over or under the fret, using correcting slants, and adding selective bar pressure to certain notes.

Merry Christmas everybody!... J-D,