I also play steel guitar (among other things) and have tried various things over the years to get midi to do steel work.
The biggest problem of course is that the ear's clue to a steel guitar is the fact that two note or ten note chords involve some notes sliding up (pedals) or down (knee levers) while other strings drone the same notes...all at the same time. Plus there's the effect of the continually moving volume pedal effects. A dobro or slide guitar ain't gonna simulate this.
The most involved midi setup I came up with a few years back..that worked better than everything else I tried...was this....
At least five sound modules or instances of soft synths....each set to a different midi channel (this is important). In the case of a gm setup, set one of the modules to receive a channel..say midi chnl 4. Set this module to be a clean electric guitar or jazz guitar sound. This is the attack part of the note. Set a second module to the same midi channel...but set it for a nondescript organ sound. This is the sustain part of the sound. Balance the two sounds so that the clean gtr patch is slightly louder than the organ patch. Trigger these from a midi keyboard to test. Or have a couple of duplicate midi tracks of chords that pipe to these channels to trigger.
Now..set two of the other synths to an entirely different midi channel..say channel 5. Same sound scheme as above. These two together will handle "up bending notes.
Finally, set up two more synths to a different channel...perhaps channel 6. Same sound scheme as above. These will be used for your "down" bend notes.
Overdub the various types of bends/drones/single note runs you need...although you'll have to spend some time listening to real steel parts on recordings to get the hand of how notes interact with each other.
With this monstrosity set up...and being a pedal steel player myself, I was able to think and overdub and create midi steel parts that were sorta close to the real thing. Of course, you have to know when to choke notes on sustaining chords while you overdub and bring in bending notes on the alternate channels. A little hard to explain...but any of you steel players will understand.
Bottom line...this thing worked in the context of several songs I did years ago as experiments. But I only tried it a few times because it was a whole lot easier for me to just play a real steel part rather than take the time to set that midi scheme up. Plus, no matter how you cut it, there is nothing that sounds like the real thing. Especially pedal steel guitar.
In fact, if you're a guitar player, it might just be easier to use a volume pedal and simply overdub guitar parts using a similar overdub technique for droning and bending notes.
