When I fantasize about what I would buy if money was no issue, one thing I imagine a house full of instruments. The fantasy is more about the variety than the quality. Anything very expensive or rare and I would be reticent to pick it up. I also lack the collector’s impulse to accumulate many variations of the same thing. I’ve never felt the need for more than 1 electric guitar or enjoyed losing myself in the vagaries of “gear.” However, I would be quite happy to have at my disposal the ingredients of any high school band or orchestra, a piano, a drumkit, rock band stuff, some DJ equipment, a gamelan orchestra (just joking).

I’ve had enough exposure to the different types of instruments that I feel like I can wrestle a sound out of any of them. They are extremely curious objects, and it is deeply satisfying to feel one’s way into their inner physics. It can be quite startling when you crack the code and unleash a sound. This naive hacking can be as fun as any “shredding” I have been able to manage on the instruments I know best.

One instrument that I’ve always wanted but never had, or even played, is the pedal steel guitar. I think it is definitely underappreciated and underexplored, maybe because it is so strongly associated with old-fashioned country music. You can play dense chords on it, like a piano, but you can also modulate the attack, like a synthesizer. You can slide the pitches up and down, like a trombone, and make microtonal harmonies. You can slide all of the tones in unison, or you can “slide” individual tones while holding the others steady, like… what, a madrigal choir?

It has incredible emotional range, even just within country music. Some of those great songs, like “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin (With Lovin’ On Your Mind)” by Loretta Lynn or “Above and Beyond” by Buck Owens, show off it’s lively and nimble side. On boozy down-tempo songs, like “There Stands the Glass” by Webb Pierce, players can work the pedals to make the instrument “cry”. The pedal steel guitar is so flexible that, without a good bit of discipline and restraint, the sound can become rubbery, floppy, hard to take.

One could argue that when an instrument is so good at inducing a mood or a feeling in people, almost universally, that the instrument is more likely to be siloed / pigeonholed. Think hawaiian…