Steel guitars can be very deceptive, just listening without seeing.
"Gates of Delirium" by Yes, offa Relayer, has a majestic middle section,
where after the war, the winning side rises up with a glorious piece,
singing "soon, oh soon the light, ours forever, ours the right".
Seeing Patrick Moraz, a European, as keyboardist-arranger, his only Yes album,
helped make me think it was synths and guitars, but no.
When I saw Yes in Buffalo Steve Howe played all of it using a steel guitar.
Leo Fender invented the Stratocaster to be a stand-up version of a steel guitar,
and it's got some country sounding tricks going for it.
If you take a piece of cigarette foil, and fold it up less than a quarter of an inch,
and burnish it with your fingernail to flatten the folds,
you can weave it through the strings, loosely, and fold the ends around the outer strings.
That makes a Strat sound exactly like a banjo.
Yeah! A six-string banjo with a tremolo arm, nice, very nice, and always, totally unexpected.
And before you say no to Yes fans, comparing Patrick Moraz and Rick Wakeman,
with the return of Rick Wakeman after Patrick Moraz,
they didn't play all of Gates of Delirium, Steve starting with the slow, steel guitar section.
