D# on Lap Steel: the Numbers It Answers To

Everything rooted on D#, 62 qualities in 10 families. A chart will ask for three or four of them by number and leave the rest to the record, but the root is the part the number pins down, so this is the page a reader lands on first.

D# answers to the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and the 7 depending on what got called: it is a plain number in 7 of the twelve keys and needs an accidental in the other 5.

A lap steel player reads a number as a fret to slide to, with an open tuning underneath that already spells one chord — so the chart is read as a series of distances from wherever the bar happens to be. There is nothing to finger and no grip to form — the diagram is one straight bar across a fret, so the digit resolves to a single place to be, and everything expressive happens on the way there.