Thanks to all of you for this forum - I'm looking forward to exploring the various content. I'm a country/rockabilly guitar player but have recently found my double 6 lap steel just wasn't enough - so have bitten the bullet and got hold of a D8 pedal steel. In fact there are some photos of it on this very forum - it's a Denley, quite old, and I believe the general consensus is that the build quality of these instruments was very suspect from the start, but I like a challenge and have no qualms about machining new parts or making brave modifications
I have dabbled with a Sho-Bud Maverick in the past, to the point of even getting some of my (very dodgy) playing released on CD (I'm not telling you where, it's not my proudest achievement!).
Anyway, thanks for letting me join, and I'm sure I'll be back soon with a million questions.
To kick things off, does anyone have any recommendations for E9 tuning with 8 strings please? I gather, from various forums, that simply omitting the top 2 strings is a suitable compromise, but I am open to all suggestions. For the C6 neck I would follow junior Brown's tuning of Bb C E G A C E G based on my frustration with C6 lap steel with only 6 strings and the endless dilemma of C or C# on the bottom string...
Best regards,
Simon (Sid) Farley
) adds very little to your scope compared to having the tonic down there - a low C. So I messed around until coming up with (lo to hi) CEGACEGD - the top D is the one pitched between strings 3 and 4. It is a very common first string on 10 string pedal steel, although it usually 
. That added D provides a lot of fancy runs that would otherwise need much bar movement and I haven't missed any chordal properties of the low range. I would think the fact that you have pedals won't make much difference to the general principle.
. So the simplest way is to string up without the top two "chromatics" and get used to the rest of the tuning until you (inevitably) have to get a 10st!
and welcome. 
