G on C6 Pedal Steel: the Numbers It Answers To

Everything rooted on G, 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.

G 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 pedal steel player reads a number as a destination rather than a position — the pedals get there from wherever the last one ended, so a steel player marks a chart for the move between two numbers more than for either one. With the bar across 10 strings tuned to C6, the next number is often reached without moving the bar at all: a foot or a knee retunes the strings already ringing, which is why this reader's key pages draw every change of a chart as that move.