B-Bender

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B Benders are great way to add steel guitar sounds to a small group.
Although most of the sounds done with a bender can be also done with the
fingers, it allows these sounds to be produced in quick combinations by
sliding and bending. No one's fingers can duplicate the combinations
possible with a well used bender - when the player is not merely using it
as a crutch.

I use a Bigsby palm pedal setup. Only the b string is set to bend (with
the top pedal). The pedals are mounted to the extreme rear of the guitar
and they are cut off just behind the bridge in order to not get in the way
of muting and other bridge area techniques.

I have found that the b bender is quickly usable, but the adding a g or e
string bender made things too complicated. The b bender, used in
combination with finger bends on other strings will give you the biggest
boost.

I would like to have a Parsons-White bender. Marty Stuart and Albert Lee
use these real well, to name a couple of well known examples.

Any bender will be very useful to anyone playing C&W ("both kinds of
music" :-).

Happy bending,

Eddy
Eddy

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