WHAT DID YOU BUY?

To the manner Weissenborn…

Art editor Rob Antonello continued his odyssey into serious slide playing this year, making a real investment in one of Anderwood’s fine Authentic Series Weissenborn-replica Style 4 lap steels built of koa, having used one of their mahogany models before. Over the years, Rob has transitioned from playing slide on conventional electrics to a budget square-necked resonator from Fender to, finally, taking the plunge with a mahogany Anderwood Style 1M, then the big kahuna, the koa Authentic Series c.1927 Style 4. But what does playing a true-blood lap-steel instrument do for you?

“It’s really fluid, your left hand doesn’t pause,” Rob mused. “With slide on an upright guitar, your left hand can sometimes end up being really static, especially when you’re playing a full barre on a chord and your right hand is maybe doing some fingerpicking. But on a lap steel your left hand doesn’t stop moving. You can lose pitch or key, if not – so the Weissenbornstyle lap steel is a very sensitive instrument, a very emotive and beautiful instrument. I’ve been playing slide about four, five years now and I thought that with a step up, it would help to take my playing that bit further again.

“The one thing that really attracted me to lap steel for slide is that you float – the strings and your fingers don’t touch the fretboard, so it’s all about execution with your tone bar. It’s a completely new discipline and I think it really tunes your ear in to fine degrees of pitch: you always slide up into the note, and even if you slide down, you go past the note and then up into it.”