On the Stick, both of your hands are usually busy tapping, you cannot mute with the palm of your hand like you would on guitar. From playing guitar, I have learned that notes sound muted if you put your finger directly onto the fret, because the vibration of the string is dampened by your fingertip.

This lead me to the idea of tapping directly onto the top of the fret, to produce a softer, muted tone. It works quite well, the sound is pleasing to my ears at least, but you need to be a lot more precise and it's not easy to do quickly, or when your mind is otherwise busy.

This of course has its disadvantages - the Stick leads itself very well to being played chordally in both hands. Heavily restricting the positioning of your fingers will definitely get in the way of that.

Is this something any of you have experimented with before?

yes. Greg Howard's pretty good at this (like most everything else ) , if recall correctly seeing him do it before. it's a cool effect. occaisonally i'll do it . some day i'd like to work at it more to get proficient at it. i have found it helps if you flatten out your finger strike a little bit (as if you were going to do a double stop) when you go "over the top" to get a bit more of the pad of your finger involved. also i usually kind of "swoop in" from the headstock side of the fret when fretting. if you want to mute it's kind of useful to swoop in from the other side with a slight rolling motion like you're making a fingerprint. i'm exaggerating the process here but hopefully you get what i'm trying to emote works ok on double stops too. but full on chords? hmm that would be a bit more challenging

Yep. This technique has been around a long time. Although I have to say I had to go back and re-learn how to do it properly when fret rods gave way to fret rails. The rods provided a little room for slop but with the rails you need to be dead on. I actually use this quite a lot.

Ah, so nothing new. Good to know!

And thanks a lot for the tips!

A closely related technique i have experimented with is to tap with 2 fingertips close together, one just behind the fret as normal, plus the other just in front of the fret.

Less positional precision is needed.
Having the whole width of a fingertip in front of the fret provides more damping, for a stronger muting effect (tapping on the fret is only slightly muted, especially for larger gauges).

In a seminar one time, Bob told a story of how he put duct tape across the bottom of the strings, far down on the bridge. This limits the strings’ ability to ring, so that all notes are slightly muted. He said he would do this in a particular tune, and then rip off the tape with a flourish as they entered the chorus, to get the full sound of the strings for the rest of the song.

Sounds like fun - must try this.

If all of your bass notes are needing muting, try using a damper, like in the attached pic

Wow! Thanks for sharing this, so good to see it.

Is there anything Bob Culbertson can’t do with the Stick?!

This is awesome thank you.
I love the child dancing.
Beautiful music, and Stick method.