To Play Lap Steel Standing Up? The Peavey Power Slide
A lap steel that you don’t put on your lap to play it? They’ve made it at Peavey and they call it the Power Slide. Here is basically what they say about it at Peavey: “not a Lap Steel, not a Dobro, and not a conventional steel guitar”. You don’t say! An awesomely weird design and a very reasonable price of $200.
Country music and Bluegrass players are used to play square neck guitars standing up for ages now. But I’m not sure that their instruments are that comfortable to play though they seem to do fine. Peavey solved this potential “problem” of ergonomics by cutting this curved body to make it fit to the abdomen. Thus the player will be able to comfortably carry this guitar horizontally. I like the 3 points locking system for the strap, and the fourth point available to change the playing position either horizontal or standard. Ok, the design is quite weird but I kinda like it as it is. It looks like a huge tomahawk specially made for Angus Young.
Here is a presentation made by Gypsy Carns from Peavey.
I guess this kind of design would be hard to transpose to an acoustic version of this Power Slide, but who knows? Peavey… There is a suggestion made here. After all the body shape of Parker’s acoustic guitars is quite unconventional but works, and just like Pentaminor showed us recently (demo of the Washburn Rover), a reduced size acoustique guitar can be a good guitar too!
If any of you guys ever had the opportunity to play this Power Slide, your opinion is welcome. And if you do own this guitar and have it by your side, you can also submit a demo video.
To go further: the Peavey website.
C’est simplement une copie du Melobar concu pour David Lindley dans les années 80
http://www.melobar.com/History.html
Je ne connaissais pas le Mel-o-Bar… Ca semble carrément inspiré de leur modèle Sidewinder! Merci pour le tuyau… le slide… heu non, le tuyau en fait!!
original, quand même, et prix attractif.
par contre, non reversible, contrairement au lap king rodeo présenté il y a peu.
Sur le papier, c’est très intéressant, surtout pour moi qui suis nul en slide sauf, éventuellement quand la guitare est dans cette position.
Là je suis simplement très mauvais.
I just bought the power slide. I bought it local, I buy local when I can. You can save by buying on the internet, no taxes. I am a guitar player, so I figure I am a pretty good judge of instruments in the way they sound. I am no Dobro player by any means, so I can’t comment on how it should sound compared to a Dobro. For the money, and it isn’t American made, it is Chinese made, but it sounds and plays good. It is light, but it is made of wood. For me it is O.K. I just pick around on it, but I am sure with practice I’ll get better. I think it’s O.K. It sounds good on country or rock, probably jazz to. I think the heavy steel slide is better than the light steel slide on this thing, but that is a my opinion. For the money, sound and (quality is O.K.) it does well.