Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

I'd like to set up my Sliver Hawaiian as close to vintage as possible. I'm assuming flatwounds, but what gauges?

Hi.

Steel guitarists in the early years used many tunings, sometimes lowering or raising one string to give a different flavour or play
a different melody, string gauges will vary with the tension applied to the strings, the early players more often than not used Open G
high and low bass, and Open A which is the same tuning but two frets higher, you will need a sturdy guitar neck to play in this A Tuning
another popular early tuning was E7, You can get the early hawaiian sound with all these tunings, you can also try Open E tuning which is
favoured for blues, I personally like Open E for hawaiian music, There are a multitude of steel guitar tunings today all with varying string
gauges I could not possibly list them all here, but if you Google some of the Steel Guitar sites you will find that string gauges are often
listed with their given tuning, you will also find that most of them will drive you to using C6 tuning which is deemed to be the most suitable
for most styles of playing, many steel guitarists have more than one steel guitar to enable them to use various tunings, multi necked steels
with more strings offer more tunings and more variety, you probably know all this already, my advice is to pick one of the early tunings and
stick with it, you wont then get bogged down learning chords and riffs in a hundred different settings,

Best of Luck
Kanui.