Interlude: Christmas, and Touch-Style Instruments

Merry Christmas everyone. Today and yesterday were a trial, and both days started out very rough, but both Christmas Eve with my father and Christmas Day with my mother and grandfather turned out to be enjoyable days. It is the tenth anniversary of my entry and exit from the psych ward, 10 years and 3 days exactly, and my depression is - real bad, but I survived another Christmas and I did get to spend some quality time with my family. That is important to me, however tough it can be to deal with my family.

I want to talk about touch-style instruments, because I've done quite a bit of research on them, and most people haven't gotten any real information on them. The original touch-style instrument is the Chapman Stick, and the Chapman Stick company is still owned by the instrument's inventor, John Emmet Chapman. A Chapman Stick runs about 1800 dollars skinny, which is quite cheap for a professional instrument, and Chapman still builds quite a few of the instruments he sells, particularly if the instrument has been custom-ordered.

Your first big problem when you receive a working Chapman Stick is tuning and stringing the beast. Most people never get that far. The amount of time and effort it takes to tune a Stick has led to it being called "the ba*****," or the "witch with a b," in the studio industry. You need a good chromatic digital tuner (not cheap), and you need to buy the specialty strings required to even try to get as far as tuning and stringing the beast if you are set on playing a Stick. You can go over to stick.com and look at what Chapman is saying, and then you can decide if you're enough of a melon-head to give the instrument a try, and if the instrument is a good fit for you, then the instrument is worth trying.

Your second problem is going to be that you need a pretty specific electronic set-up if you are going to get the most out of a Chapman Stick. You need an amplifier with a good bass-response, but the Stick can be used to do other things, so a Roland Keyboard Amp is often not a bad idea, since it gets a good response over a very broad range. If you want or are able to spend more money, Marshall makes a broad-response cabinet, and then you buy some kind of broad-response head for the cabinet.

Further, it explains at the site that you need what would be called a "broad-response pre-amplifier," in order to make the beast work right, and there are cheaper or more expensive versions of those. So, even if you make a pretty skinny-Stick order from Chapman's site, say 2200 dollars, you're are looking at maybe 3000 dollars in electronics if you want to really get that Stick to play.

The Stick has normally been used to play bass parts, because it gets a very round, solid tone at a very low register. It can be tuned to just a bit above the contrabass A on a piano without any muddiness at all. The Stick gets a very punchy attack, which is not a good bass sound for certain types of music, but is great for the studio industry, as punchy basslines have been the in-thing since Bo Diddley. The first reason it gets that attack is that you play a stick by clipping the frets of the Stick at the string, and the sound results from the string hitting the fret. Chapman uses a diamond shaped fret-barre, which makes the instrument a little hardier, and also accentuates that punchy attack.

However, the goal with the Stick was not to make a bass instrument, but to make an instrument that could play multiple parts across a broad range. It is not a hard instrument to play, once you get the beast strung and tuned, but to get the most out of a Chapman Stick requires a great deal of thought, time and effort. There aren't more than maybe 5 professional quality Stick players in the world today, at my last count, and there is a good reason for that.

One of the first people to really man-handle a Stick was Tony Levin, and his Stick playing on Peter Gabriel's "So," album, or on King Crimson's "Discipline," is amazing stuff. Check out "Red Rain," or "We Do What We're Told," or "Mercy Street," or "Big Time," or "Sledgehammer" off of that PG "So," record. It's amazing stuff. As far as Discipline goes, the pick tracks are, "Sheltering Sky," or "Discipline," or "Indiscipline."

Just as a funny note, a Middle Eastern terrorist group once tortured some hostages by playing, "Thela Hun Ginjeet," off of that Discipline album over and over until they went bonkers. That is one terrifyingly ugly piece of music. We will do a Fripp-azoid and a King Crimson spot here at the blog someday, as Fripp is one of my favorite guitarists, and King Crimson is one of my favorite groups. However, even I pass on "Thela Hun Ginjeet."

As far as the best of the best, there is a Stick player named Guillermo Cides, who I believe hails from Argentina and he is the real guy to check out. As soon as you hear Cides touch the Stick, you know that everything is totally different. He does rely on some loops and things to get the job done, but he plays Bach Cantatas and works simultaneous counterpoint lines and all sorts of amazing stuff. The way the notes sound, you instantly know how much better this guy is than any other Stick player you've ever heard in your life. That isn't to insult Levin, who is just a family-guy, and an industry standard player who just punches his chip and doesn't expect any tabloid press. Levin is a good man and a good player, but Cides is the guy when it comes to the Stick.

As long as there are the electronics to build this kind of sophisticated electronic instrument, people will need and people will play the Stick or something similar to it. Chapman himself would like to improve the instrument, but has yet to come up with a way to improve the instrument that matches his vision for his invention. There is one other version of the touch-instrument worth mentioning, and it is called the Warr Guitar.

The Warr Guitar does have some advantages, and the two big ones are "sturdier construction," and "better electronics." However, those two advantages do not go without some explanation, because Chapman doesn't build his Sticks that way for some good reasons, and Chapman is no fool. There are also two big disadvantages to the Warr Guitar, the first one being, "price tag," and the second one being, "a heavy loader."

Anyone who has performed with a true Gibson Les Paul Standard Guitar knows that the 6 or 7 pounds that guitar packs over a Fender Strat makes a huge difference in your spinal tap. That guitar is one of the best hard-rock guitars in production in the world, but it is simply too heavy to play night-after-night without intense discomfort. A Warr guitar is probably double the weight of a Gibson Les Paul Standard, and the Stick comes in at maybe the same weight as the Les Paul Standard - if not just a titch lighter. That makes a big difference when you are doing frequent playing.

The price tag is also a rather disconcerting feature, and "5000 dollars skinny," would be somewhere about right. For a professional quality instrument, that is a pretty average kind of price, but still, saving a couple of thousand dollars for the Stick - which is in most ways better - is not chump change to anyone on a budget, and even a rich man needs to be on a budget. You can run a Warr guitar on pretty much the same 3000 dollars skinny setup as the Chapman Stick, although at some point we do need to do some gear talk, and if you are going for pro-quality, 3000 dollars is a little too skinny for a setup. Takes money to make money, honey!

As far as sturdier construction, it does make a difference, as a Warr guitar will be found by aliens in 3000 years, and the Stick does have a tendency of wearing out in maybe 10 or 12, and that is if the instrument is cared for well. Also, the Warr Guitar instrument has a denser body and therefore gets a bigger tone. That is one reason the Gibson Les Paul "rocks the Casbah," so well, is that it has a very dense body, and that leads to a very dense tone, which is what you want in a hard-rock style.

The electronics piece is interesting. The top-of-the-line Warr Guitars come with two piezo-electric pickups installed, and piezo's get wonderful sound. They are in fact the best pickups made in the world today, and Warr Guitar does not skimp on it's piezo pickups. The Stick uses a passive "acoustic-electric pickup," and this is not a very expensive pickup. However, the upside to those AE pickups is that they don't overload at hardly any volume, and they wear like an old dot-matrix printer. Some of you probably don't remember those.

Piezo's are very easy to damage, and they overload all over the place because of the pickups' high-response range. If you're running a Warr Guitar, you are definitely going to need a good programmable digital gate (BIG MONEY!) and you should probably also turn down from eleven and use a limiting head for your cabinet. You will lose some tone, but with the dense body and the piezo pickups, Warr Guitars really have too much tone.

There is another instrument that Warr Guitar sells, and I am not really a "bass-head," but I've considered buying one someday. They run 22 or 2400 dollars skinny, and it is a touch-style bass setup just about exactly like any standard four-string barre-fret electric bass, plus two piezo pickups. That is a killer instrument. I've thought of some funny tricks to play with the puppy as well, like tuning and stringing everything to one note or to fifths or octaves only to get all overlap on the fretboard. Boy I would like to give it a go if I had 3000 dollars or so to knacker around with. When the cash-flow barge comes in, look for an order from me, Warr Guitar!

Okay, I think we're going to do guitar next, and then we'll hit GEAR! I love talking gear. What we're going to do in the upcoming guitar article is start with some pointers for people getting started on guitar. I'm just gettings started, but I did my homework and I'm willing to let you copy my homework. Then we'll probably talk about guitar tuning issues, as long as the article is not already overly long.

I will try not to really bust the bandwagon with theory when we talk about tuning. However, tuning a guitar is problematic, and the major reason is that the standard guitar tuning is awful. Almost no-one who plays guitar professionally EVER uses standard tuning. We'll have to hit some theory, but I'm working out in my head how we can leave the bandwagon intact as we do. Back in a moment.