Dan Beller-McKenna wrote: 4 Feb 2026 4:21 am Well, since you brought up the topic again… Another option is to lower string 10 to A. This gives you a big fat chord on the bottom end, much like a six string. Power chord grip is 10-8-6(B). I lower 10 on my A pedal (still raising string 5, B-C#), which might be a non-starter for a lot of players (and I do have to have the B-C# raise on that string, which I put on LKV), but it opens up some nice harmonic and melodic possibilities. Just a thought.
To E9th players, the 9th-string D is important because having it there, without having to pull it in with a change, made a lot of things possible when E9th was first put together — especially adding the A-pedal and building vocabulary around it.
Historically, that makes sense: E9th didn’t come out of thin air. Bud Isaacs was an avid E13th player, so the b7 was already living rent-free in his head.
If you look at the E9th/B6th Universal from a practical standpoint, there are basically two ways to deal with the missing D:
- drop the bottom E to D (B6th pedal), or
- raise the bottom B a minor third to D.
To me, the raise makes more musical sense. D and B are more likely to be used together, and that low D is pretty far down there for most harmonic work anyway. Lowering E to D (with the E’s already flattened on the lever) gives you essentially the same sound as P6 on C6 — a IV7 at the same fret.
Back in my E9th/B6th days (that would be about two decades ago), I actually eliminated the typical B-to-D replicator raise and instead moved the E-to-D lower from the B6th pedal side onto a lever. That brought “P5” and “P7” next to each other and freed up a change for some other… let’s call it important musical business.
I lived quite comfortably with that setup.
Fast-forward to today: on my C6-only S12, I still have “P6” on a lever. Old habits don’t die — they just get more opinionated.
But let me digress here jest a li'l bit:
What’s also interesting is seeing this 15-year-old thread resurface and re-reading Paul Franklin’s analysis — especially his reference to Bireli Lagrene playing "Sweet Georgia Brown" at warp speed.
Bireli was a phenomenon as a kid already. Coming out of Gypsy Jazz, he later ventured into pretty much everything and left fingerprints all over European and U.S. music. Even his violin playing is frighteningly good, which hardly seems fair.
Traditionally, Gypsy Jazz players learn chords and arpeggios first, then add approach notes and enclosures to each chord tone. I’ve seen that method passed directly from older players to the younger generation. That’s the foundation.
Musicians like Bireli — who eventually roam beyond the “family recipe” — also get exposed to players from very different learning backgrounds, absorb that information, and then bring it *back home*. You can hear it clearly in his playing. He introduced ideas to Gypsy Jazz that many of his peers were never even exposed to.
Buddy Emmons did the same thing. Paul Franklin does it. Many of our greats did — and they didn’t remain musically confined to the “Music City USA” bubble.
So when a Nashville steel guitarist references a Gypsy Jazz guitarist from Europe, that’s not an accident.
What steel players might want to take from this is fairly simple:
our heroes listen to — and learn from — a lot of musicians playing entirely different instruments and styles.
That’s how Buddy Emmons approached non-pedal steel at age 14.
Maurice Anderson attended master classes by Barney Kessel.
Doug Jernigan mentions what he got from Joe Pass and others.
Meanwhile, many players here keep asking how BE or others “did this or that,” while the actual answer is sitting in plain sight:
they listened outside their own backyard.
... J-D.
