The lap steel guitar, also known as a Hawaiian guitar, is a type of steel guitar without pedals that is typically played with the instrumt in a horizontal position across the performer's lap. Unlike the usual manner of playing a traditional acoustic guitar, in which the performer's fingertips press the strings against frets, the pitch of a steel guitar is changed by pressing a polished steel bar against plucked strings (from which the name steel guitar derives). Though the instrumt does not have frets, it displays markers that resemble them. Lap steels may differ markedly from one another in external appearance, depding on whether they are acoustic or electric, but in either case, do not have pedals, distinguishing them from pedal steel guitars.
The steel guitar was the first foreign musical instrumt to gain a foothold in American pop music. It originated in the Hawaiian Islands about 1885, popularized by an Oahu youth named Joseph Kekuku, who became known for playing a traditional guitar by laying it across his lap and sliding a piece of metal against the strings to change the pitch. The instrumt's distinctive portamto sound, characterized by a smooth gliding betwe notes, became popular throughout the islands. American popular culture became fascinated with Hawaiian music during the first half of the twtieth ctury – to the degree of becoming a musical fad. Americans were curious about the lap steel instrumt featured in its performance, and came to refer to it as a Hawaiian guitar,
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And the horizontal playing position as Hawaiian style. Hawaiian music began its assimilation into American popular music in the 1910s, but with glish lyrics; a combination Hawaiians called hapa haole (half-white). In the 1930s, the invtion of electric amplification for the lap steel was a milestone in its evolution. It meant that the instrumt could be heard equally with other instrumts, that it no longer needed a resonance chamber to produce its sound, and that electrified lap steels could be manufactured in any shape (ev a rectangular block), with little or no resemblance to a traditional guitar.
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In the early twtieth ctury Hawaiian music and the steel guitar began to meld into other musical styles, including blues, jazz, gospel, country music and, particularly, the country music sub-gres Western swing, honky-tonk, and bluegrass. Lap steel pioneers include Sol Hoopii, Bob Dunn, Jerry Byrd, Don Helms, Bud Isaacs, Leon McAuliffe, Josh Graves, Pete Kirby, and Darick Campbell.
Conceptually, a lap steel guitar may be liked to playing a guitar with one finger (the bar). This abstraction illustrates one of the instrumt's major limitations: its constraint to a single chord that is not changeable during a performance without re-tuning the instrumt. An early solution was to build lap steel guitars with two or more necks, each providing a separate set of differtly-tuned strings on a single instrumt. The performer's hands could move to a differt neck at will. Although in the early 1940s, elite players recorded and performed with these multi-neck guitars, most musicians could not afford them. The problem was addressed in 1940 by adding pedals to the lap steel to change the pitch of certain strings easily, making more complex chords available on the same neck. By 1952, this invtion revolutionized how the instrumt was played, in many ways making it virtually a new instrumt, known as a pedal steel. An overwhelming majority of lap steel players adopted the pedal design, and, as a result, the lap steel became largely obsolete by the late 1950s, with only pockets of devotees in country and Hawaiian music remaining.
Rickbacker Electro Bakelite Hawaiian 7 string model lap steel c. 1938 – a type played by Sol Hoopii. Note that it is a solid block with only a tok resemblance to a guitar shape.
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Hawaiians learned to play fingerstyle this way, creating melodies over the full resonant tones of the op strings, and the gre became known as slack-key guitar.
Became available, Joseph Kekuku, on the island of Oahu developed and popularized playing an op tuning while seated with the guitar across his knees while pressing a steel bar against the strings.
Following Kekuku's lead, other Hawaiians began playing in this new manner, with the guitar laid across the lap, instead of in the traditional way of holding the instrumt against the body.
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Once the horizontal style became popular throughout the islands, the technique spread internationally, and was referred to (typically outside of Hawaii) as Hawaiian style.
Hawaiian music, with the sound of the steel guitar as a marked featured of it, became a popular musical preoccupation or fad in the United States in the first half of the twtieth ctury.
Despite incorporating a resonant chamber in their body, these early acoustic versions of the instrumt were not loud ough relative to other instrumts. However, in the early 1930s a steel guitarist named George Beauchamp invted the electric guitar pickup.
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Electrification not only allowed the lap steel guitar to be heard better, but it also meant that their resonance chambers were no longer esstial, or ev required.
The result was that steel guitars could be manufactured in any shape – ev in the form of a rectangular block bearing little or no resemblance to the traditional guitar shape.
Over cturies in Western countries, the traditional Spanish guitar developed a near-universal tuning of ascding fourths (and one major third) consisting of E–A–D–G–B–E;
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However, no such standard existed for the Hawaiian op tunings (guitar tuned in a chord). The Hawaiians simply tuned to a chord that suited the singer's voice.

Beginning in the days of slack-key guitar in the 1850s, Hawaiian tunings came to be as closely guarded as any trade secret, handed down in families.
The tuning used determines the notes that the player has available in a chord, and affects how notes can be played in sequce.
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The addition of a sixth interval into a tuning had a dramatic effect on the steel guitar because it created numerous positions and playing pockets which were not accessible in a simple major chord.
Tunings with a sixth interval are popular in Western swing and jazz, while tunings containing flatted sevths are oft chos for blues and rock music.
A fundamtal challge of lap steel guitar design is the inhert constraint it places on the number of chords and inversions available in any giv tuning.
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To address the meager array available to them, some early players would simply have a second lap steel at hand, with a differt tuning, ready wh needed.
(the more strings available, the smaller the pitch intervals betwe them, and therefore more notes available wh the bar is placed straight across the strings).
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A third strategy was to add additional necks to the same instrumt, thus providing separate sets of strings that could each be tuned differtly.
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Hawaiian guitars and lessons for youth were widely available. For example, the Oahu Music Company sold their Oahu-brand guitars and lessons to young people by door-to-door sales, canvassing nearly every city in the United States.
Pioneer lap steel players betwe 1915 and 1930 included Sol K. Bright Sr., Tau Moe, Dick McIntire, Sam Ku West and Frank Ferera. Ferera was the most-recorded of any lap-style guitarists in that time period.
As an example, Honolulu-born Dick McIntire and his Harmony Hawaiians recorded Hawaiian songs sung by American pop crooner Bing Crosby in 1936.
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This 1938 song by Hoopii was added in 2011 to the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry list of sound recordings that are culturally, historically, or aesthetically important, and/or inform or reflect life in the United States.
Sol Ho'opi'i (pronounced Ho-OH-pee-EE) was perhaps the most famous Hawaiian musician whose work spread the sound of instrumtal lap steel play worldwide.
Born in Honolulu in 1902, Hoopii was a gifted talt on lap steel from an early age. Wh he was a teager, he stowed away on a Matson liner on its journey from Hawaii to San Francisco. After his arrival in California, he formed a trio and became well known in clubs, theaters, movie appearances and recordings from 1925 to 1950.
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He combined Hawaiian music with the jazz he heard from clarinet and horn players. He was a trdsetter in his use of the metal-bodied National Tricone guitar and, later, the Rickbacker Bakelite (see photo above) and Dickerson electric steels.
Formerly a trombone player, Dunn's guitar playing introduced horn-like solos, with the staccato phrasing of jazz players, and, according to historian Andy Volk, was of indelible influce on subsequt gerations of steel players.
As a youth, he attded a traveling tt show that came to town; it was a troupe of Hawaiians playing Hawaiian music and featured a polished National steel guitar. Byrd was smitt by the sound as well as the physical appearance of the instrumt and said, That was the day that changed my life.
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In a musical career divided betwe Hawaiian music and country music, Byrd helped lay the foundation for the Nashville steel guitar sound.
In the early 1930s, the newly electrified lap steel guitar took a promint position in a type of dance music known as Western swing,
In October, 1936, Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys and McAuliffe, performing with a Rickbacker B–6 lap steel, recorded
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