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These instruments use the E9 copedent shown above on the neck farther away from the player. Most pedal steel guitarists play steel guitars with two necks. Obviously, including "h" made the word's pronunciation even more difficult, so I quickly dropped that letter from its spelling after first printing it in a four-tune instructional course I published that year. I wanted the pedal steel guitar to have nomenclature, by having identifying words and terms dedicated to it alone." In my early writings I always used the phrase "tuning and pedal arrangement" to refer to a person's "set-up." It was in 1969 that I coined the copedent word, but initially spelled it "chopedent." The "h" was from the first three letters of the word, chord. As I wrote many times about why I came up with this word, I simply got tired of using "set-up" to describe a player's basic tuning and the changes in that tuning when engaging pedals and knee levers. "I toyed with several acronyms before coming up with "copedent." Frankly, I didn't like this word, but everything else I coined seemed even worse. The originator of the term, Tom Bradshaw, said: A hard push lowers the 2nd string 2 semitones to a C ♯ and simultaneously the 9th string only 1 semitone (both ending on C ♯). A soft push lowers the 2nd and 9th string by only 1 semitone from their original pitches. RKR: "Right Knee Right" Here the player's right knee, when leaned against the right lever, has 2 stops.RKL: "Right knee left" The player's right knee, when it moves the lever left, produces this result.LKR: "Left knee right" The player's left knee, when it pushes to the right, produces this result.
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Means that the left knee lever, when activated by raising the left knee vertically (toward the player's head), will lower both the 5th and the 10th string one semitone to an A ♯. The left knee lever, when pushed to the left, raises the 4th string and the 8th string by one semitone, from E to F.
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If a player added an additional string, tuned differently, or changed the order of the strings, it either caught on with others or it did not. During this period, a consensus developed toward standardization of the 10-string pedal steel guitar to support optimal chord and scale patterns across a single fret. The tuning evolved from 1950 to 1970 by incremental refinements by many elite steel guitarists playing on tour. The Nashville E9 tuning for a steel guitar (also called the "E9 Chromatic Tuning") : 7 is the most common tuning used in modern country music.