How to spend $9 at Radioshack in pursuit of classic steel guitar sounds

There is a sound that steel guitars make on old country records from the ’40′s and ’50′s that you rarely hear anymore, sometimes referred to by steel guitarists as “boo-wah”.  At its simplest, boo-wah is achieved by playing a major 6th chord and playing with the steel guitar’s tone control so that you are moving between a bassy sound and a more clear, trebly sound.  Listen to Jerry Byrd’s playing on Hank Williams’s 1949 “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” to hear what I’m talking about:

Jerry Byrd was a master of the using the tone know to get a boo-wah sound, making it another possibility for expression on the instrument.  Speedy West took that technique and used it with “bar slams” on the inside neck of his Fender 1000 to develop a signature style.  You can hear a classic Speedy West bar slam and boo-wah at the 56 second mark in “Caffeine Patrol”:

So, being the avid Speedy West fans that we are, Andy and I set out this morning to add some boo-wah to his Fender 500.  The Fender 500 started its life as a Fender 1000, which is a double-neck 8-string pedal steel, but at some point, someone decided to chop it in half, making it a single-neck 8-string pedal steel.  Fender made a single-neck 8-string pedal steel, the Fender 400, but we think it’s more appropriate to call Andy’s steel a Fender 500 to acknowledge its origins and status as a hacked-up guitar.  The frustrating thing about Andy’s Fender 500 is that, before it was cut in half, it actually had volume and tone controls between the two necks.  If those were still on the guitar, we could have just hit a few chords, cranked on the tone knob, and declared victory.  Instead, we decided to add an outboard tone control, and a couple other features.

We began by considering how we wanted to achieve the boo-wah effect.  Some steel guitarists used the tone knob on the guitar.  Others used a volume pedal with a side-to-side tone control, made by Fender or Bigsby.  Still others suggest that the best way to get the rapid-fire effect you hear on Speedy West and Jimmy Bryant records requires a tone circuit attached to a momentary push-button switch.  We decided to try the first two methods in our prototype, and also add in a “stutter” switch: a normally closed momentary kill switch.

With an idea of how we wanted to achieve our boo-wah, we headed off to Quinn Labs (Ryan’s basement) to draw up a simple circuit to build into an aluminum chassis.  The signal comes in through a 1/4″ jack, and goes to a push/pull switch on a 250k potentiometer.  When knob on the pot is down, it acts as a tone knob.  When the knob on the pot is pulled up, treble is cut is controlled by a push button switch.  After the tone controls, the signal passes through a second momentary switch for the “stutter” effect and then to the 1/4″ out jack.

Since this is just a prototype to work out capacitor/resistor values and prove to ourselves that it would be a worthwhile addition to Andy’s sound, the final result is pretty ugly.  Here’s Andy using the effects a couple minutes after we hooked them up:

We are excited enough with how this came out to build a boo-wah box into a more rugged enclosure.  I think we may also need to add another capacitor to the circuit to tame some of the clicking we were occasionally hearing from the tone “switch” (which did not show up on the video above).  It’s great when geeking out about steel guitarists can lead to geeking out with soldering irons.

-Ryan