Can you learn on them? yes

Will you outgrow it fairly soon ?
Yes ..if you are actually learning..

The phrase of "Not needing anymore than it has" is pretty self limiting...

don't paint yourself into a corner..

Up until 1964, the majority of professional level steel guitars had mechanisms no more advanced than a Maverick. Which takes into account a great percentage of the solos that caused everyone to fall in love with the steel guitar in the first place.

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Herb's Steel Guitar Pages
Texas Steel Guitar Association

The biggest drawback was that you could not put both a raise and a lower on the same string. So you had to choose whether your 4 and 8 string lever was to be an E raise or E lower. Both of these are very standard for pedal steel since the '60s. Not having one or the other of these from the git-go is a major learning deficit.

If all one were to use would be ABC and a D Lever I would rather go with another guitar. And then you get into an issue where the semi-pro student model is almost as expensive as a good used S-10 with 3x4.

BTW, my Maverick has two pedals and one lever. Guess which!

another required finger if you will...

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When and who used the "F" lever first and about what period of time.?

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Ed, as b0b mentioned, it was Lloyd Green who first used that change, and the first recording that it was used on was D.I.V.O.R.C.E. by Tammy Wynette.

Farris, the Maverick's did indeed lower. That was what the knee lever did, it lowered the 2nd and 8th strings.

Folks can say all the bad things they want about a Maverick, but the first Maverick that I played, which was one of the vinyl covered ones, was such a major improvement over the guitar that I started with, that for a while I thought the Maverick WAS a pro level guitar!!!

So you had to choose whether you wanted a string to raise or lower, it couldn't do both. I never knew that the stock lower was on strings 2 and 8. On the advice of Charlie, Shobud put on a new LKL that raised strings 4 and 8 by the same mechanism as the pedals (the coat-hanger pull-rod pulling the finger against the body at the left of the changer hole. So the stock RKR lower lever could not lower string 8. They set it up to lower 2 and 9. Which was the standard for RKR on the pro models. But you see, I lost the lower on 8. You could conceivably have a LKR to lower something, but you had to pick something that didn't already have a raise or lower. I guess you could have lowered 1 and/or 7. You could get multiple raises by attaching more than one pedal to the yokes that attached the ball-end bell-cranks to the coat-hanger pull-rods. The yokes could swivel to pull strings evenly, as long as the coat hangers were the proper length for each string.

So I guess the Maverick could properly be called a coat-hanger raise-or-lower pedal steel. One of my pull rods was an actual piece of coat-hanger that I used to get one of the pulls even.

I don't know that the Maverick was much worse than the first Bigsby pedal steels, or the original ShoBud permanents. But today, with all the great old used pro models available from the Forum, or dealers like Bobbe Seymour and Scotty, a beginner can do better than a Maverick, for only slightly more money.

[This message was edited by David Doggett on 24 January 2005 at 10:26 PM.]

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I have said this many times-Take a 'Converted" Maverick w/a George L PU-Go behind the curtain on stage and play to a croud, and watch and see how many leave or "BOO" the player.

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OH- the audience has to be general people and no STEEL players voting.

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In that case, I don't believe a difference would be detected. I'm not so sure that John Q. Public would know the difference in sound between a lap steel and a modern day D10.