For those who don’t know, The Stick was invented by a guitar player about 30 years ago as an instrument somewhat guitarlike, but allows the player to make notes by merely touching the fretboard at a particular location. Now, you can do this on a guitar, after a fashion, but you have to crank the amp way up, and worse, the string tends to sound on both sides of your finger. On a guitar, if you finger the first (high) string at the fifth fret, the length of string from your finger to the bridge will sound a high A, but you’ll also get a ghost sound from the same string, from your finger to the nut.
But on the Stick, the ghost-tone problem seems to have been solved, and from looking at the link above, I still can’t understand how he managed to do that.
Do any guitarists here know? And has anyone played a Stick? How hard was it to learn?
I was at a guitar store a few years back and saw a guy trying one out. It’s a crazy instrument, that’s for sure. I suppose it would be about as difficult to learn as tapping is. I’m not sure how he fixed the ghost note problem, though. I would assume that it’s not fixed.
I have never played one myself, but (and perhaps you know this) the majority of every King Crimson song, from 1981 to the present, featured either the Chapman stick or the similar-in-concept Warr Guitar. Tony Levin and Trey Gunn made them sound great, but that doesn’t mean we mortals would be able to.
I played one quite a bit in a music store I used to hang out at just for fun. It was fun to screw around with and did not seem that hard to get used to. I don’t remember having much of a problem with ghost notes, my problem was making my right hand work. I think that there were string dampeners of some sort by the nut.
Regi Wooten–Victor’s brother, who plays guitar in his band when he’s away from the Flecktones doing solo shows–solves this problem with what I think are a couple of pony tail holders. They’re tight enough to dampen the ghost notes (which would be a big problem in his style of playing), but loose enough to allow an open string to come through, and small enough to be pushed out of the way when he wants to play on the first few frets.
Exactly what I’m wondering. But one thing that intrigue me about the Stick are, one, that it seems suited to very small hands. I saw a street musician using one Saturday night and couldn’t help notice he had even smaller hands than I do. I’ve always wished I had bigger hands, and could do that thumb on the fretboard thing. On the Stick that’s not an issue. Another thing is that I’ve played piano and classical guitar in the past, and I think I’d be suited to the Stick. The creative possibilities seem endless.
For some reason I thought I remembered Charlie Hunter playing his modified guitar only using tapping techniques, but from pictures I see, it doesn’t seem to be the case. He has a similar thing going though, with two bass guitar strings below his six guitar strings. It’s pretty crazy.
I flirted with buying a Stick a while back. My friend had one that I messed around with and I played a couple in music stores. I play fingerstyle guitar and like to mess around with electric bass and keyboards, so it intrigued me. The creative possibilities do seem endless.
So while I appreciate the concept of the Stick, the thing I can’t get past is it’s timbre. To me it just doesn’t sound that good, which I guess in inherent in tapping, as opposed to plucking, the strings. Maybe if I had a rack of judiciously applied effects I could compensate for it’s dullness, but on it’s own the sound just doesn’t do it for me. My mind hasn’t been changed much by recordings I’ve heard, either. Despite all that I still haven’t entirely ruled out buying a stick, though. It’s just on the back burner these days because I barely have time to play the instruments I have.
I wouldn’t expect it to allow the variations in tone you can get with a guitar, by altering how and where you pick, but then a piano doesn’t have a whole lot of variation either on a note by note basis.