The British Steelies Society

Hi All,
Just wondered if anybody knew what effect that Jerry used on his steel on Workingmans dead. It's been one my favourite albums since I was a teenager....must have spent 20 years listening to it not knowing what a steel guitar was!
Anyways as I seem to play this tune a lot for fun just thought I'd try and recreate the sound a bit more
Here it is

I think it could well be a subtle touch of this

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=mxr+p ... sQ_AUIBygD

The good old MXR 90.

Sorry Roger I couldn't copy the picture

I've only recently got into The Dead, by way of the stuff Jerry did with David Grisman, The Pizza Tapes. And now I'm a dead head in more ways than one.

Danny might be right, I know Jerry had a Phase 100 later on and also a Mutron III phaser. But it sounds like a Leslie rotary speaker to me. Similar to his guitar tone through a Leslie here:


You could get very close with a MXR Uni-Vibe and there are loads of rotary speaker simulators out there.

Workingman's Dead is fantastic, we often do Dire Wolf in my band with varying degrees of success

After a bit of searching on the American forum it sounds like he was using the Mutron iii around that time but it does sound very Leslie ish

Just out of interest Mickey Hart and Phil Lesh did a 5.1 remix of Workingmans Dead and American Beauty in which they included a lot of steel Garcia wouldn't let them use on the original as he didn't think it was good enough.

I have the surround version of American Beauty on DVD Audio which won't play now on my Sony player as they had a different surround format on the go. From what I remember there was some sweet steel worth listening to, been meaning to rip the dvd for years and get the separate tracks into a different format so I can listen to it again. You can buy surround tracks for both albums I believe but from memory they're not cheap.

Been a Deadhead since the early 70's, saw them twice, in 1972 at the Bickershaw festival, Gracia also played some steel with The New Riders of the Purple Sage who were the support act and London 1974 I think, , when they had the wall of sound. 1972 was definitely the best one.