Practice

Lap Steel

A lap steel is a guitar played horizontally with a tone bar instead of fretting fingers. The strings sit high above the fingerboard so the bar can glide cleanly along their length. Open tunings — usually C6, A6, or E13 — turn every fret into a usable chord, and the absence of fretting hands frees the player to focus on intonation, vibrato, and tone bar movement.

The lap steel was the original electric guitar. From early 20th-century Hawaiian music through Western swing, country, blues, and sacred steel, this single instrument established the vocabulary that pedal steel later expanded.

The parts of a lap steel

A lap steel shares many components with a standard guitar — body, neck, headstock, pickups — but the geometry is different. The strings ride high over a flat fingerboard with painted (not raised) fret lines. There is no truss rod adjustment for relief; the neck stays dead straight. Tone bars, picks, and palm-blocking technique replace the fretting hand entirely.

  • Raised nut: a tall metal or bone nut that lifts the strings 8–12 mm above the fingerboard so the bar never touches the wood.
  • Painted fret lines: visual markers only — the bar produces the pitch, not raised fret wire.
  • Flat or near-flat fingerboard: a flat radius lets the bar contact every string evenly when laid across.
  • Tone bar: a polished steel cylinder (sometimes bullet-nosed or grooved) that the player slides along the strings.
  • Pickup & volume: almost always a single pickup with a volume and (sometimes) tone control — nothing more.
  • Bridge: a fixed metal saddle — no movement, no intonation per string. The flat fingerboard handles all intonation.

Body types

Lap steels come in several distinct body styles, each with its own ergonomics and amplification approach.

Style Era Tonal character
Hawaiian (acoustic) 1900s–1930s Hollow wooden body played acoustically — sweet, mellow, intimate volume; the original lap steel sound.
Resonator 1920s–today Aluminium cone(s) project an acoustically louder, brighter, more cutting tone. The instrument of choice for blues and country before electric amplification.
Electric solidbody 1932–today Solid wood or metal body with a single pickup — the Rickenbacker “Frying Pan” was the world’s first electric guitar. Sustained, focussed, amp-dependent tone.
Console / multi-neck 1940s–today Two, three, or four necks tuned differently, mounted on a stand. Lets a single player switch between C6 (rhythm, swing) and E13 (bluesy, country) mid-song.
Student / square neck 1930s–today Compact, affordable instruments designed for the lap. Often acoustic-electric, often square-necked — not playable Spanish-style.

Tunings

Open tunings define the lap steel. Without a fretting hand, the only way to get a chord is to tune the open strings to one. Each common tuning has its own genre and its own chord vocabulary.

Tuning Strings (low → high) What it’s good for
C6 C E G A C E The all-purpose Western swing and country tuning. Every fret is already a major-6 chord; perfect for comping behind a band.
A6 A C# E F# A C# C6 transposed up a minor third — same intervals, brighter range. Common on Hawaiian and country records.
E13 E G# B D E G# A dominant 13 chord on the open strings — built for blues, gospel, and sacred steel. Close to standard guitar “Spanish” pitch.
Open E E B E G# B E A pure E major chord open. The classic blues lap steel tuning popularised by Elmore James and Sonny Landreth.
Open G D G D G B D A pure G major chord open. Common on resonator and bottleneck Spanish-style instruments; works on lap steel too.
High-G C6 A C E G A C A C6 voicing with a brighter top register — popular on Hawaiian-style 6-string lap steels.

Set any of these tunings using the String Warrior tuner — choose “Lap Steel” from the instrument list. The lap steel chord and scale pages also have a tuning picker that recomputes voicings and re-labels open strings for whichever tuning you pick.

Tone bars

The tone bar is the lap steel’s fretting hand. Material, weight, and shape change tone, sustain, and the kind of slants you can play.

  • Stevens bar: a long, slim chrome-plated steel bar with a flat bottom and rounded nose. The country and Western swing standard — lets you play forward slants easily.
  • Bullet bar: a heavier solid bar with a bullet-shaped nose. Rounded at one end so it can roll for vibrato; favoured by Hawaiian and pedal-steel players.
  • Bottleneck / glass slide: a hollow glass tube. Shorter sustain than steel, warmer top end — the blues sound, though more often used Spanish-style.
  • Brass bar: denser than steel, longer sustain, slightly warmer. Heavier on the wrist; not for everyone.
  • Grooved (“Dunlop”) bar: small grooves at the nose let you isolate single strings for slant work without bumping neighbouring strings.

Pickups

Most electric lap steels carry a single pickup mounted between the bridge and neck end. The lap steel’s sustained tone and slow vibrato show off pickup character more than fast Spanish-style playing does.

  • Horseshoe / blade pickup: a single coil with a metal “horseshoe” over the strings. The original Rickenbacker design — powerful, slightly midrange-forward, the historic lap steel sound.
  • Charlie Christian blade: a long bar magnet with a blade pole piece. Smooth, woody, dark; the “Hawaiian” tone heard on countless 1940s recordings.
  • P90 single coil: retrofit favourite — loud, articulate, picks up bar movement clearly. A common upgrade on student-grade lap steels.
  • Humbucker: quieter (no 60-cycle hum) and warmer; less distinctive in the lap steel idiom but useful for sacred steel and electric blues at high volume.
  • String-thru / under-string magnetic: some console steels mount the pickup so the strings pass through the magnet field directly — clean, focused, and feedback-resistant.

Strings

Lap steel strings need higher tension than standard guitar strings — the bar has to glide over them, and slack strings rattle and choke. Most C6 sets fall in the .015–.038 range, heavier than standard 6-string guitar.

  • Roundwound nickel: the all-purpose standard — bright, clear, picks up bar slide noise (some players want this; some don’t).
  • Flatwound: smoother bar travel, less slide noise, warmer tone. Favoured for jazz lap steel and some Hawaiian players.
  • Phosphor bronze (acoustic lap): for resonators and acoustic Hawaiian instruments — warmer, woodier, less suited to electric pickups.
  • Stainless steel: brightest of the wound options; longer-lasting; can wear bar surfaces faster.

Tuning matters more than gauge: a C6 set must be tensioned for those specific pitches. Don’t cobble a lap steel set from a regular guitar pack — the wound G string in particular has to handle a lower tension than its standard role.

A short history

The lap steel’s lineage runs from late-19th-century Hawaiian musicians (Joseph Kekuku is widely credited as the first to play guitar with a steel bar in the 1880s) through 1920s Hawaiian recording stars (Sol Hoʻopiʻi, King Bennie Nawahi), to the 1932 Rickenbacker A-25 “Frying Pan” — the world’s first commercially viable electric guitar.

Western swing and honky-tonk bands carried the lap steel into country music: Leon McAuliffe with Bob Wills’s Texas Playboys, Don Helms behind Hank Williams. The pedal steel guitar evolved out of multi-neck console lap steels in the 1950s, eventually displacing lap steel as country’s primary slide instrument.

Lap steel never disappeared. Sacred steel guitarists in African-American Pentecostal churches preserved a distinct vocal-style tradition. Hawaiian music continues to feature it. And modern players — Robert Randolph, Greg Leisz, Sonny Landreth, Cindy Cashdollar — continue to expand what the bar can say.

Once you know the gear, put it to use: