Slants and stringpull

[Tony Russell Davis]

In the last issue of the BSS newsletter Stan Moseley mentioned two techniques ("bent" chords) in his article on tunings. These achieve chords that a normal slant cannot.
One was a forward slant where the bullet nose of the bar "frets" two strings at the same fret and a lower string at a different fret. The other was a reverse slant where you have to string-pull one of the notes to raise it to be in tune with the chord. This achieves the same effect as the first, three strings at two different frets, but with a reverse slant.
There will be a tab in the next newsletter that uses both these techniques so I thought a picture or two might be more helpful than the tab alone. It's such a very difficult thing to describe in words alone.

Here is the forward slant. The tip is directly over the same fret for two strings and the centre-line of the bar crosses the fret below on the next string down.

These two pictures show the reverse slant and you can see the third finger has hooked a string and is pulling it up to pitch to complete the three note chord. The bar is held with the thumb and second finger at either end, the first finger helps to control the pivoting action going into and out of the manoeuvre.

[Basil Henriques]

Interesting, the "Split Slant" (as it known) has been in the lap steel players repertoire for quite a while, in fact a lot of the tab in the magazine Aloha Dream has split slants, and has had since 2002.
The pull behind the bar is the basis for Kayton Roberts's style and is well documented in many tutorials. (Whilst not wishing to take away from Stan Moseley's articles.)
Very nice and informative pictures Tony..

[Danny Mitchell]

That looks extremely tricky. Very informative indeed.