Why a bar, not a fret
A steel guitar has no fretting hand. The bar lies across every string at once, at one fret, and the picking hand chooses which strings speak. So a chord is only there if the tuning, moved up by the bar, already holds it — every string whose note belongs to the chord can sound, and every other string has to be left out. The chord pages here are built on exactly that rule: each one lists the bar positions that spell the chord, and a chord with none is marked rather than faked with a shape no bar can hold.
Two instruments, kept apart
The lap steel sits in one open tuning all night; its pages chart the six strings the registry gives it. The pedal steel is a different instrument: ten strings, and pedals and knee levers that retune a few of them while they are held, so the same bar position spells a different chord with a foot or a knee engaged. Its chord pages chart the open strings — every pedal up, every lever at rest — and say so, and every one of them doors into its copedent.
The copedents, worked out
A copedent is a pedal steel's open tuning plus what each pedal and lever does to it. The copedent pages chart two of them, the E9 neck in the Emmons setup and the C6 neck in the maker's factory setup, each cell taken from a named source. Every combination the knees allow is worked out into a tuning, the combinations no source describes are named and refused rather than guessed, and for every one that resolves the page shows what a straight bar holds.
The dobro lives next door
The squareneck resonator is played with a bar too, but its deep home is Guitar Warrior, alongside the rest of the guitar family. This site describes it and links there; it does not chart it twice.
Hear everything
Every bar position, note map and drill on the site plays back in the browser, so your ear can check a position before your hands commit. The tuner and metronome are free, run entirely on your device, and need no account.
Part of the Warrior Network
Pedal Steel Warrior is made by Cyberpunk Industries LLC as part of the Warrior Network. When you want to compare an instrument beyond these two, String Warrior covers every chord and scale on 20+ string instruments — the sites share their underlying music data, and each writes its own pages for its own players.
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