Beard Trailhead Lap Steel Lefty (USED, 2026)

Left-handed lap steels at this level basically do not come up. Left-handed, Lollar DC-90s, a one-off inlay, and this top? Once.

A customer of ours recently sat down with Beard and spec'd out a lap steel that simply does not exist anywhere else: left-handed, a flamed maple cap under a red burst that goes nearly black at the edges, and a range of mother of pearl mountain peaks running up the ebony board where the slotted diamonds usually go. The coolest part? They double as position markers. There was a lot of thought given to this build and it shows.

The Trailhead exists to solve a specific problem. Play dobro in a band with any volume to it and you spend the night fighting feedback and losing. The Trailhead is chambered mahogany with that maple cap, built to a 25" scale that matches dobro scale exactly, with 8.75mm spacing at the nut and 11.75mm at the bridge. Your hands already know where everything is. You pick it up, you play, and you turn up as loud as the room needs. Beard usually builds these with P-90s as standard. This one came out with a pair of Lollar DC-90s, a hum-cancelling dual-coil design voiced after Lollar's '50s Wind P-90. Same midrange push, same snap and growl, none of the buzz. On a lap steel that is not a small thing. You spend your life on long sustained notes and volume swells, which is exactly where single-coil hum has nowhere to hide. Neck position gives you the round, vocal thing. Bridge gives you cut when you need to sit on top of a band. Both of them stay quiet.

It ships with Beard's Stand-In, a body-thickening piece on the back that lets you move between sitting and standing without renegotiating your whole relationship with the instrument. Small idea, and the kind of thing only a shop that actually plays these would build. Priced with original hardshell case.