Lap Steel: Chords for a Country Arrangement

The chord reference for this chair. Pick a root, then any of 62 qualities, and get the shapes plus the thing a chord chart never tells you: what this chair does with the chord once the arrangement is running.

The lap steel chair carries a held chord under the singer — the bar laid across the strings, slid into place and left to ring. Its strings are already tuned to a chord, CEGACE, so there is no shape to make — only a fret to lay the bar on, and the slide that gets it there in time for the change. Every diagram below is a straight bar or a short slant, and a quality this tuning cannot spell that way is marked instead of drawn.

Every shape below is drawn for CEGACE, 6 strings, with the open shapes first and the movable ones up the neck after them, and each one plays back so you can hear it before it goes on a record.