Wanted to let SE know about this:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... %26otn%3D1

Obvious knockoff. According to the info the company that's making this is called Hyler Touchstyle Instruments and apparently they make them on some scale cause the Ebay seller stated they were looking to become a dealer. I don't know the level of SE's patent or trademark protection, ect. but I figured it didn't hurt to let them know about it.

Take care guys.
Josh

Here's what a Google search revealed:

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
About HylerTouchstyle
True Name
Hyler Touchstyle Instruments
Biography
Instrument Manufacturer
Location
San Diego, CA
Interests
Music
Occupation
Luthier and Shop Manager
Signature
Back in 1835, when Halley's Comet was overhead, same night those men died at the Alamo, they say Samuel Colt made a gun. A special gun. Story goes that with it, he made thirteen bullets. A hunter used the gun a half dozen times before he disappeared, the gun along with him. They say this gun can kill anything.......

While we don't build guns, we try and build each of our instruments with as much dedication, inspiration, precision, and purpose as this.

http://www.myspace.com/hyler
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Jeff

TOUCHSTYLE
For the benefit of those who are new to the forum and haven't seen the term "touchstyle" before this thread...

Touchstyle doesn't really have anything to do with making music. It's just a marketing term used by people who want to sell instruments based on Emmett's Free Hands two-handed tapping method (his book Free Hands, a new Discipline of Fingers on Strings was first published in 1974). Calling it touchstyle makes it possible for them to market this "revolutionary" and "exciting" new way of making music without telling people where it really came from. Cheeky, I know...

Touchstyle is not a name that Emmett has ever used, nor was it used by anyone before the mid 1990s, when it was made up by a Stick player for marketing Stick lessons in a newsletter. He and a few others eventually promoted and sold another tapping instrument (also based on the Free Hands method, and "Chapman Stick" tuning, clearly a winning combination ), using touchstyle as their name for the playing method (the same playing method Emmett directly taught to them. double cheeky).

You might sometimes see "touchstyle" retroactively applied to anyone who ever tapped on strings (van Halen, Holdsworth, Hedges, Batten, Webster, Manring, etc) - not by the artists, or by anyone in the mainstream music press, but rather by these same instrument marketers and their online buddies, and without the agreement of those artists, of course. This is just a smoke-screen to try to convince people that the name has been around for a long time, and therefore has some legitimacy as a "musical term".

Mercifully, the touchstyle marketers haven't really been able to pull off their cultural coup, though not for lack of trying. It's pretty easy to see that most of these instruments are based on Emmett's method concepts as embodied by The Stick.

To be fair, it's possible that this newcomer isn't even aware of the marketing-based revisionism the name of their instrument represents. time will tell...

Anyway,
You can read more about the differences between Emmett's approach to tapping and what came before him (the Touch System) here: http://www.stick.com/articles/evolution/

and here: http://www.emmettchapman.net/music/freehandsmethod.html

Personally, I never thought touchstyle was a very good name. This is not a "style," it's a complete approach to making music. We're tappers, not touchers! happy touching? forget it...

TRADEMARKS AND PATENTS
Anyone can easily see what trademarks Stick Enterprises claims and has been officially granted by the US patent and Trademark Office, as well as those registered in foreign countries at this URL:

http://www.stick.com/legal/trademarks/

SE is obliged to defend their trademarks against misuse, or they risk losing them. There was a thread about this recently on stickist.com: http://www.stickist.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=1244

I just thought newbies would like to know. Please feel free to point people to this post if you don't feel like explaining it yourself.

"Touchstyle" is a weak, smarmy term...I wonder if "Emmett Chapman's two-handed tapping technique" could be shortened to "Chapman tapping", as a countermeasure...? Calling it "Free Hands" doesn't give credit where due.

Mad Monk.

Let me guess. They were inspired by Jimmy Webster right?

'Chap Tap'

Chap Stick just ain't right....


Dave

Hi Randy,

I think Free Hands is a great name because it really describes the feeling you get when it's all clicking. It was a really inspired name for the method.

Type "Free Hands" into any search engine and you'll find Emmett. There's absolutely no confusion as to where Free Hands comes from.

Of course the more Stick players use the name to refer to the method, the more that will reinforce the origin of it, and help counterbalance the revisionism of "touchstyle" marketing.

If you just want to call it "two-handed tapping," that's a totally neutral approach, but it's not very specific as far as what the right hand is doing; The name "Free Hands" is specific about what the hands are doing; Emmett described the method quite specifically in his book:

"two hands playing independently on one fretboard, the hands engaging the board from opposite sides." (page 2)

"The left hand grabs chords and taps bass lines from under the Touchboard, in the fashion of guitar or bass, while the right hand taps melody and shapes chords from over the Touchboard, more in piano fashion." (page 3)

Free Hands was first published in 1974, 20 years before the word touchstyle was dreamed up to refer to this method.

here's the pic from page 3 that shows the hand orientation, (text and pic posted here with permission).

Is that Randy Strom?

yep

Sadly, I just bought a Hyler off of eBay hoping it would at least be a "squier" to the CS's "strat". I was going to use it as my beater while I learned the method and saved up to one day buy the real thing.

Here's a laundry-list of my gripes:
The action is terrible, the bridge is probably the cheapest available, the frets are uneven towards the bridge-end of the neck, the spacing is extremely tight (even tighter than a guitar, the pickup is weak, the bridge and pickup are not snugly attached to the "body", there is glue sticking out from where the fretboard meets the "body", the dampener does not work, the intonation is bad, the frets are not snugly set, the tuning goes out all the time, no truss-rod (although I'm not sure if the CS is supposed to have one), nothing to secure a shoulder-strap or belt-hook to, no finish (and I don't mean "unfinished", I mean that there is nothing on the wood to protect it), the sides of the fretboard are jagged, ... the list goes on into minutiae...

The patenting issue is a tricky one because the CS is an expensive instrument and I wish there were some less-expensive models (or competing manufacturers) available. Sadly, it seems that to cut costs on this instrument they cut corners. You often get what you pay for, but unfortunately the CS (and its imitators) are so rare that they can drive up the price.

I regret buying it as the money could have been spent on a better instrument. I plan to try and get sounding and playing as good as possible because I still want to venture into Stick territory. Maybe someday I will be able to buy a real CS, which obviously is my preference.

Lesson learned, the hard way.