From country to Hawaiian music and from blues to rock, the singular flowing sound of the lap steel guitar has a distinct spot in music history. A stringed-instrument lain on the lap and played with a slide; once you've heard a lap steel guitar, you remember it forever. So, if you're thinking about exploring the lap steel guitar, you'll find a range of different models to flip through right here at Bax Music.
Buying a Good Lap Steel Guitar
Our range includes solid-body lap steel guitars fitted with a magnetic pickup so they can be hooked up to your favourite amplifier. Electric lap steels come with an array of different body shapes, so you'll have no problem finding the right model to suit your particular style.
Steel Guitars
The lap steel is a member of the 'steel guitar' family and is sometimes called the Hawaiian guitar. You can also describe a resonator guitar and pedal steel guitar as a steel guitar, and while they're all part of the same family, each instrument has its own distinct and memorable sound, so you can always tell them apart. Steel guitars are also a standard fixture in genres like blues, country, gospel, as well as traditional music styles that originate in India.
The Gliding Sound of the Lap Steel
To get those classic gliding notes out of lap steel guitar, the fretboard is played with a slide while the strings can be plucked with bare fingers; a set of finger plectrums; a thumb plectrum; or sometimes a standard plectrum combined with a hybrid-picking style. While you can get away with using a normal guitar slide to play your lap steel guitar, most lap steel guitarists opt for a specially designed 'tone bar' or 'steel bar'. Since they're based on the dismembered neck of a glass bottle that started it all, these slides are also affectionately called 'bottlenecks'.
Lap Steel Guitar Strings
Lap steel guitars always have a special open tuning, so it makes sense to use strings designed for that kind of tuning. Any standard lap steel with have six strings, just like most standard guitars, so you can find specially-designed lap steel guitar strings included under the electric guitar strings section of our site. Pedal steel guitars often have more strings - usually ten.
Lap Steel Guitar Tunings
Lap steel guitars don't have the standard E, A, D, G, B, E tuning of a normal six-string guitar, but usually have an open tuning. In western swing and Hawaiian music, the standard C6 tuning is used: C, E, G, A, C, E. Other popular open tunings are G: D, G, D, G, B, D, and D: D, A, D, F#, A, D. There are plenty of common variations as well, like Open-A: E, A, E, A, C#, E, and Open-E: E, B, E, G#, B, E.
Frequently Asked Questions About Lap Steel Guitars
What is a lap steel guitar?
The lap steel guitar is literally lain across your lap and played by sliding a tone bar or slide up and down the fretboard with one hand and plucking the strings with the other hand. You can get acoustic lap steel guitar like the Weissenborn, but electric solid-bodied models tend to be more popular.
