If you have a JV card compatible Roland keyboard or synth module, search ebay for the "Country Collection" JV card (SR-JV80-17). The samples are quite good for not only pedal steel, but also fiddle, and many other country instruments.

I need to find some pedal steel guitar samples or loops to use in the background

I don't think this is an area where loops would be very effective.
I'd find a decent pedal steel player... and be done with it.
You can spend hours fiddling with MIDI... and end up with mediocre (or worse) results.

Sony Nashville Wire.
Pedal Steel

There was a thread a while back about using an actual player: http://forum.cakewalk.com/tm.asp?m=205298&mpage=1&key=𲣂

ORIGINAL: Seattle_Ray

I've looked at some steel guitar loops before, but haven't found anything that's really very usable. However, I know a great steel player that I've worked with before and I'm sure you could get him to play the parts for a pretty reasonable amount. He lives just outside of Nashville and another mutual friend of ours has a ProTools studio and they do a lot of long distance tracks for folks. I use them for for steel guitar, country lead guitar (Forrest Lee Jr is awesome country guitar) and they can also bring it great fiddle players, drummers, etc.

Usually they can do an entire song for a few hundred bucks (for pretty much any country instrumentation). Anyway, if you're interested I can put you in touch with them.

Martin is the Steel Guitar player....you can see him playing on this youtube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jOMB2M9piw
And Forrest Lee Jr plays guitar and is a great country producer ...check out his youtube video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIzFo_UrD64 (yeah, that's me on bass....gotta get my plug in too )

Hope this helps...

Hi Seattle,

Thanks so much for the links to the videos. These guys play fantastic! I especially like Forrest Lee's tele work. Wow! He plays that style as good as you can play it. I captured a couple of his lessons so I can learn some of those licks myself (on my '68 Tele, which I bought in 1968).

GK

I played pedal steel for 27 years, 8 of those as a session player in N'ville.

I've never heard anything other than a real live steel player that can pull it off in a believeable manner.

Just my 2¢...

I know you guys all like to chime in, but I think my post was asking if anyone knew of any good pedal steel guitar samples, not "Do you guys think I should use a real pedal steel player?" Its simply out of the question, unless they are free, so enough already

I was flippin' thru the cable channels a couple nights ago and saw an advert for a Guitar World sponsored lesson featuring Steve Morse. So I clicked on it. He teaches how to play pedal steel licks using a conventional electric guitar. He made it look easy and it sounded like the real thing but let me tell you... it's hard! He really stretches the heck out of those strings. He'll stretch a string a couple octaves whlie only bending the adjacent string one octave. Maybe you can catch that lesson and play yer own licks.

Redneck Jazz Explosion....

Hi David Stuckey,

There is a decent pedal steel sample in Sonar TTS-1. After inserting synth pick a channel then go to the patch field (in the track midi track) and right click to pull up the patch browser and type in "pedal" to find it.

Tom Laskey