I'm Wade. I'm 44, I sell insurance, and in January of 1998 I bought a pedal steel guitar, which is the instrument that makes the crying sound in old country records, the one that slides up under the singer and makes you feel like something's about to go wrong in your life. I'd wanted one since I was a kid listening to my dad's records. I'd played regular guitar since high school, badly, and I figured, how different can it be.

Very. It's very different. This page is a journal of the last twenty months of finding that out, written for anybody else who's thinking about it, especially if you're not twenty anymore. I'm not a teacher and I'm not good yet. But I've made every mistake there is at least twice, and I've written them down, and that might be worth something to you.

Short version: it's the hardest thing I've ever tried to learn, I'm still terrible, and I played my first paying job in August. All three are true.

A pedal steel isn't held; it sits on four legs in front of you like a little table, and you sit behind it on a stool or a chair. The strings run flat across the top, raised up high off the neck, and you never press them down to the frets. There aren't really frets, just lines painted where frets would be. Instead you lay a heavy steel bar across the strings with your left hand and slide it up and down to change the pitch. Your right hand picks. Your feet work the pedals. Your knees work the knee levers. Everything is going on at once. It's an instrument designed, as far as I can tell, by someone who hated the human body.

Mine is a used single-neck ten-string with three pedals and four knee levers, which is the standard student setup and plenty to get going. I paid $1,100 for it with the case, from a fellow two counties over who'd bought it in 1989 with the same plan I had and got about six months in. That's a common story, I've learned. There are a lot of pedal steels in closets. The professional instruments have two necks, one in E9 tuning and one in C6 for the swing and jazz stuff, and eight or more pedals, and they cost as much as a used car. I'm a long way from needing one.

Along with the guitar you need: a volume pedal (more on that below), a steel bar, a thumbpick and two fingerpicks, an amplifier (steel players want a clean, loud one; I use a solid-state amp with a 15-inch speaker), a seat of the right height, and a great deal of patience. About $200 for the extras if you shop used.

A regular guitar is tuned E-A-D-G-B-E, low to high, and the strings are in order. The standard pedal steel neck, the E9 ("E ninth") tuning, is ten strings and they are not in order, which is the first thing that scrambled my brain. From string 1 (closest to you) to string 10 (farthest away), it goes:

Strings 3 through 6 and 8 and 10 (G#, E, B, G#, E, B) are just an E major chord, so with no pedals pressed, the bar straight across any fret gives you a major chord: open is E, third fret is G, fifth fret is A, and so on. That part's easy and it's how I spent my first week, sliding a bar around playing major chords and feeling like a genius. Strings 1 and 2 (F# and D#) and string 7 (F#) and 9 (D) are the "chromatic" strings that give you the extra notes for the ninth chords and the fancy licks. String 9 is where the crying comes from, mostly. It took me a year to touch strings 1 and 2 at all.

The tuning was worked out in Nashville in the 50s and 60s by the session players and it's more or less standard now, so a lesson book or a tab sheet from anybody will work on anybody's guitar. The chart of how a particular guitar's pedals and levers change the strings is called a copedent (from "chord-pedal arrangement"; I didn't make that up), and every steel player has one written on a card in the case.

The pedals are what make it a pedal steel, and they're what make the sound. Each pedal, when you press it, pulls or pushes on rods under the guitar that stretch or slacken certain strings, raising or lowering them a half step or a whole step while the others stay put. So you can be holding a chord with the bar, press a pedal, and have some of the notes slide up into a different chord while the rest hold still. That sliding-into-the-chord sound is the whole thing. That's what you bought the guitar for.

The three floor pedals on a standard E9 guitar are called A, B and C, left to right, and in general terms:

• Pedal A raises the two B strings (5 and 10) a whole step to C#.
• Pedal B raises the two G# strings (3 and 6) a half step to A.
• Pedal C raises strings 4 and 5 (E and B) a whole step to F# and C#.

A and B together, pressed with the left foot at the same time (you rock your foot across both), turn your E major chord into an A major chord without moving the bar. That's the move. If you've heard a pedal steel you've heard that: the A-and-B pedals going down and coming back up. I did nothing but that for about a month.

The knee levers hang down under the guitar, and you push them with your knees, left or right, in or out, to raise or lower other strings. On mine, the most important two raise the E strings a half step to F, or lower them a half step to D#, which gets you minor chords and a bunch of other things. Every guitar's levers are a little different (that's what the copedent card is for), and figuring out which knee does what while your feet are doing something else and your hands are doing two more things is where grown men start to cry.

The bar. A solid steel cylinder, about three and a half inches long and heavier than it looks, held in the left hand and laid across the strings. It doesn't touch the neck. Wherever the bar is, that's your fret, and since there's nothing to stop it, you're in tune only if the bar is exactly over the fret line. A sixteenth of an inch off and you're sour. On a regular guitar the fret does that for you; here, it's your ear and your hand and nothing else. You also use the bar to slide between notes, and to add vibrato by rolling it back and forth, and you tilt it or lift the back end to play just some of the strings. The left hand also has to mute the strings behind the bar with the fingers trailing along, or everything rings and it sounds like a mess. This took me six months.

The picks. A plastic thumbpick and two metal fingerpicks, on the index and middle finger, worn like little claws. You pick with the thumb and two fingers, which gives you three notes at once, which is a chord, which is most of what the steel does: plays chords and moves them. Your right palm also has to block strings you don't want ringing. Palm blocking, they call it, and there's an argument about whether it's better to block with the palm or the picks, and I've decided not to have an opinion until I can do either.

The volume pedal. This is the thing nobody told me about. Your right foot sits on a volume pedal all the time, and the steel player's sound, that swelling thing where a chord rises up out of nowhere and fades into the next one, is the volume pedal. You pick the note with the pedal partway down, then swell it up, so the attack of the pick disappears and it sounds like the note just arrived. You're also using it to even out the volume as the strings decay: as the note dies, you push the pedal down to keep it going, which makes the steel sound like it can sustain forever. It can't. It's your foot. I did not know any of this when I bought the guitar, and the day I figured it out was the day it started to sound like a steel instead of a guitar lying on a table.

1. Everything is moving at once. Left hand on the bar (position, vibrato, muting, slants). Right hand picking and blocking. Left foot on the pedals. Right foot on the volume pedal. Both knees on the levers. There's no part of you sitting this one out. On a guitar, at least your feet are off duty.
2. There are no frets. Your intonation is entirely your ear and your hand, and when you're a beginner your ear isn't good enough to hear that you're flat, so you can't fix it, so you stay flat. Playing along with records is the only cure. My wife can tell you about the first year.
3. The tuning makes no sense at first. Ten strings, not in order, half of them the same three notes in different octaves. It took me months before I could look at the neck and know what string I was on without counting.
4. You can't see your hands and your feet at the same time. Simple as that.
5. Nobody around here plays one. There's no steel teacher within an hour of me. I've learned from two instruction books with cassette tapes, from a couple of videotapes I ordered by mail, from playing along with records at half speed on a tape player with a pitch control, and from one afternoon with a real player who was passing through and let me sit behind his guitar for an hour. That hour was worth the first six months of books.
6. It sounds bad for a long time. A beginner on guitar sounds like a beginner on guitar. A beginner on pedal steel sounds like a cat in a dryer. There's a stretch, roughly the first year, where you're not sure it's ever going to sound like anything, and that's where the closets fill up with steel guitars.
7. It's not portable. Guitar, case, legs, pedal rack, volume pedal, amp, seat, cords. Two trips to the car. I don't take it anywhere unless I'm getting paid or fed.

And why it's worth it: because when you finally hold a chord, rock the A and B pedals down and swell the volume pedal at the same time and it comes out right, it is the most beautiful sound a person can make with a machine, and you made it, and you will sit there and do it forty more times in a row like a fool. I have.

An hour a night, six nights a week, in the spare bedroom after the news. I've kept this up since about March of 1998 with a few holes for vacations and one bad stretch in the fall of '98 when I almost quit. Here's what an hour looks like now:

• Tune up (5 minutes). With an electronic tuner, every string, and then check the pedals: press A, are the B strings coming up to a true C#? The pedals go out of adjustment and if you don't check you spend the hour fighting the guitar.
• Bar control (10 minutes). Slow scales up one string, listening to the tuner or a record, trying to land dead on the fret. Then slow slides from fret to fret with vibrato, trying to keep the vibrato even. Boring. Essential. Skip it and I can hear it the next night.
• Pedal drills (10 minutes). A-and-B down, up, down, up, in time with a metronome, then with the volume pedal swelling in time with it. Then adding a knee lever. Trying to make the pedal motion smooth instead of a stomp, because a stomp makes the pitch jump instead of slide.
• Blocking (5 minutes). Playing three-string chords and stopping them clean with the palm and the left-hand fingers. Nothing ringing that shouldn't be.
• A song (20 minutes). One song at a time, from a tab or by ear off a record, at half speed until it's clean, then a little faster. Right now it's a slow one in the key of E with a lot of A-and-B pedal work. I've been on it three weeks.
• Play along with a record (10 minutes). Any old country record, in a key I can find, just trying to play something that fits, even if it's one note per measure. This is the part that's actually fun and it's the part I'd skip if it were first, so it's last.

What I've learned about practicing at 44: slow is fast. Ten clean minutes beat an hour of sloppy. And stop before you're frustrated, not after, because the frustrated version of you doesn't learn anything and it's the one your wife has to eat dinner with.

January. One year in. Took stock. I can play major chords in tune most of the time, work the A and B pedals, and get through two songs slowly. I cannot use the knee levers without stopping to think, my blocking is bad, and my volume pedal foot has a mind of its own. Resolved to fix the knees this year.

February. Discovered I'd been tuning the guitar wrong for a year. Not the strings; the pedals. The A pedal was pulling the B strings just short of C#, and everything I played with it was a hair flat and I'd been hearing it as "the steel sound." Adjusted it with a wrench and a tuner and it was like somebody cleaned my glasses. If you're starting: check your pedal stops with a tuner. Do not trust your ear yet.

March. Knee lever month. Drilled the E-lower lever (E to D#) every night for a month with the metronome until my right knee did it without me. Minor chords! Turns out the sad songs need them.

April. First time playing with another human. My neighbor Dennis plays rhythm guitar and we sat in his garage and did a slow country waltz for an hour. I was a mess but it was the best hour since I bought the thing. Playing with a person is different from playing with a record: the record never waits for you, but it also never looks at you.

May. The afternoon with the real player. A fellow who'd played in a road band for twenty years was in town visiting his sister, and Dennis knew the sister, and he came by and sat behind my guitar for ten minutes and made it sound like a record. Then he watched me for five minutes and told me three things: my bar hand was too tight, my picks were too far in on my fingers, and I was sitting too low. Fixed all three that week. Six months' worth of progress from one afternoon.

June. Bought a used volume pedal with a smoother action. The old one had a dead spot at the top. Also bought a better seat. My back thanks me. Started playing along with the radio in the evenings, just chords, finding the key by ear. Getting about half of them.

July. Dennis's band, the ones who play the VFW dances, lost their steel player to a move to Texas. Dennis asked if I'd sit in on a few songs at the August dance. I said no. He asked again. I said no. He said they'd pay $40 and there'd be a plate of food. I said I'd think about it, which meant yes, and then I didn't sleep right for three weeks.

August. See below.

September. Working up more songs for the October dance. Learning to play behind a singer, which means playing less: fills between the lines, not over them. Twenty months in. Still terrible, but a more specific kind of terrible, which I'm told is what progress looks like.

The Saturday dance at the VFW hall out on the county road. Dennis's band plays it once a month, three sets, from eight to midnight, for about sixty people who've been dancing to the same songs together since before I was born. I was going to sit in on six songs in the second set. Six songs I'd played a few hundred times each in the spare bedroom. Slow ones. Nothing with strings 1 and 2.

I got there at 6:30 to set up, which takes me twenty minutes and takes a real steel player five. My hands were shaking putting the legs on. Dennis's drummer, a big quiet fellow, looked over at some point and said "nobody's listening, they're here to dance," which I've decided is the best thing anyone's said to me this year.

What happened: the first song, I came in late and played the intro fill a half step sharp because I was looking at the dancers instead of the bar. Nobody noticed. Nobody was listening. They were dancing. By the second song I'd stopped looking up. By the third I could hear the bass player, which I hadn't been able to do at all before because the blood was roaring in my ears. On the fourth, a slow waltz, I did the A-and-B swell coming into the chorus, the thing I've done ten thousand times in the spare bedroom, and it came out clean, and an old couple near the stage turned their heads toward the steel for just a second while they danced, and then went on. That's the whole story. That's the gig. I'd do the whole twenty months again for that second.

The fifth and sixth were fine. I played too much on the fifth and Dennis gave me a look, and I played less on the sixth. Then I sat at a table by the wall and ate a plate of ham and green beans and shook for an hour. Dennis gave me two twenties and a handshake and said "October?" and I said yes before I could think about it.

What I learned: a gig isn't the spare bedroom. It's louder, you can't hear yourself right, the tempo is whatever the drummer says it is, and you're going to make mistakes in front of people and the people are going to keep dancing. Twenty months of practicing alone made me able to play the notes. One night in the VFW made me a little bit of a steel player. Not much of one. But it's a different thing than it was on August 20th.

October 16th, second set. If you're in the area, come dance. Don't listen.