Is "Swedish massage" something that is supposed to be practiced around here (I live in Sweden) or is it just a name for something?

BTW, I am an EWI-ist, since I play the EWI (Electric Wind Instrument). It is an electronic wind instrument with touch sensible pads for finger tapping. The EWI is definitely not "a saxophone" since it doesn't have any mechanical parts and no reed; you blow into a plastic hose and control pitch for intonation or vibrato by biting this mouthpiece or sliding thumbs over a touch sensitive sliding plate or ribbon. To me the EWI is way more a "touch" instrument than anything with strings ever could be.

I quite agree for the most part, but if enough people call it that it will become the accepted term, even if it's technically incorrect.

Not all the instruments in a brass section are made of brass.

The English horn is neither English nor a horn. The French word for "curved" happens to sound a little like "English," so it stuck.

If you want to talk marketing terms, think of Phillips head screwdrivers. That started as a trademark of Phillips Screws. Even the word "tidy" to describe something neat or clean actually originated with the cleaning product Tide.

All of that is okay as long as the intended meaning is conveyed, which, like all words, comes from multiple speakers repeatedly using it to refer to the same thing. I'm simply saying that in the end, despite our diligence to proper convention, Sticks and other tapchordaphoniums will be named whatever the majority of people talking about them decide to call them.

Well, it's a little like a piece of music one composes. There might be an original intent behind it, but after a while it takes on a life of its own and goes wherever it will go. Language is like that. For the time being, I can understand your aversion to "touchstyle." In the longer scheme of history, the fact that it's peddled as a marketing gimmick so successfully might end up making it the name that wins out.



I always thought it was because the word "Republican" can be used as both an adjective or a noun, so people got lazy; Republicans in the Republican party, Democrats in the Democrat party. Neither term really means what it originally meant anyway.



I understand the sordid history of one-upsmanship behind "touchstyle," but I disagree that only people with an agenda would use the term. In fact, I would say that the majority of the people who use it simply heard it somewhere as a descriptor of a certain style of playing. There is nothing inherent in the word "touchstyle" that says "not Emmett Chapman's creation." It's not like those companies are calling it "Bunkerstyle" or something. Most people don't know the Bunker story or care about the minute difference in technique; since the Stick is the most well-known tapping instrument, they probably simply think Emmett invented touchstyle, which he did.



Right now, you're correct. But if it catches on, it could be both of those things at some future time, long after the companies who started it are gone.

Right on Phillips, but wrong way 'round on tidy:

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?sea ... hmode=none



The actual name of the party is the Democratic Party, but it's members are referred to as Democrats, as opposed to "Democratics" for example.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrat_Party_(phrase)
http://mediamatters.org/research/200608160005

"Democrat Party" is pure dig.



I think you missed the word "knowingly" in my post.

so here's your context:
http://www.megatar.com/english/touchsty ... story.html

and this:
http://www.premierguitar.com/Magazine/I ... _Warr.aspx

Both of which don't tell an accurate story of where their instruments come from, and both of which lay credit for two-handed tapping, in general, as it exists today at Websters and Bunker's feet, even though the method the post-Emmett builders learned was Emmett's, not Bunker's. They all had Sticks, they all had Free Hands, and their instruments used Emmett's tuning in their earliest versions (I guess Emmett is one of the "musicians" who came up with a tuning or two in the PG article)

If you really think the difference is so "minute", please watch this video:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAstqXR4QTc[/youtube]

The things the right hand can do in this approach are entirely different from what the left hand can do. The difference between this approach and Emmett's Free Hands method is huge.

By the way, I think Dave is a killer musician, and has developed his playing to a high art. But there are very few people playing two-part music who use this approach. I take nothing away from his accomplishments. It does him no disservice to say that his method and his instrument are different from Free Hands and The Stick.

To give Free Hands another name is akin to saying that Melville did indeed write Moby Dick, but we've decided to publish our own versions of it, call it Touchy Richard, and publish our own Touchy Richard sequels.

The upper board of the Duolectar is fretless! That's cool. So this is the original Touch Guitar? Good to know.

No, it's got frets.

The strings are further apart to enable the right hand's fingers to be side-by-side lined up with the strings, and there's an arm rest to keep the right arm from dampening the strings.

So you can see how different it is from The Stick, which makes me not want to call all these instruments "touch guitars", they're just too different.

Wow! The World According to Traktor.

He just wraps it all up so neatly into this self-serving ball of revisionist history. Emmett is barely mentioned, only at the very end lumped into the usual suspects of "douchestyle." It would be pathetic if it wasn't taken seriously by some followers of his thinking.

That's what I was talking about when I said you have to define yourselves or else be defined by others.

All these guys came along who were directly influenced by Emmett, then decided to co-opt his playing method and call it their own and redefine the term. They justified this douchey behavior by lumping him into a cast of obscure characters. It helped their cause to marginalize his discovery, even though they all learned from him. That kinda sucks, don't you think?

A last thought on "touch" and "touch guitar"

It's true that Emmett called his instrument the Chapman Stick Touchboard, and that Touchboard is one of his trademarks. So I can see that using the word "touch" in some way isn't totally off-base, but Bunker's instrument and his playing method really don't resemble any of these other instruments or Free Hands, so it seems a poor choice to call them all touch guitars, or to call the method "touch guitar".

When referring to the playing method, Emmett always calls it tapping. Free Hands lays it all out clearly:

Page 4 and 5

The Tap/Hold method

"To play a single note, a finger lightly taps and holds a string against a fret...

"The tapping action initiates the vibration...

"A light tap with one finger...

try tapping...

Since the means of sound generation (tapping) is subtle..."

Page 71 from "The Game of Stick Music" (1975)

"The heart of the innovation is the method of playing a stringed instrument, that is, tapping and holding the strings without picking, so that each hand can play independently and simultaneously, as a pianist plays..."

You might be wrong. Listen again, especially to the chord glissandi he makes by the end, after 2:00 and on. I hear no half note jumps - as frets should imply - only the seamlessly sliding pitch typical for a board with no frets.

Hi Per,

I'm often wrong, it's true (as my kids are always reminding me). But I think in this case it's not so. If you listen to the intonation of each chord, and the way they transition, especially when he moves up and down the neck rapidly (like around 1:50) it's clear there are frets. They're just hard to see them in the video. All of the pictures of his instrument I've ever seen have frets, though I think the frets on the upper neck are smaller guitar frets, compared to the frets on the lower neck.

Part of the effect is created by all the notes not necessarily crossing the fret at the exact same moment, so the chord "rolls" over the fret. You can do this on a Stick, too, but the amplification you use will make the difference in how it sounds. Crank up the verb and the mids, roll off the treble, and slide, slide, slide.

You'll also find if you play through a guitar amp, it sounds a lot more like a guitar through a guitar amp! This is probably the biggest weakness of digital amp simulators. They focus almost exclusively on "tone", and very little on sustain qualities a cranked up tube amp will provide (at least all the modelers I've tried suffered from this failing). If you don't have an amp, use lots of compression.

When I listen to Dave, the more surprised I am that there aren't more people playing his instrument. It could be that the mental process of having two completely different hand relationships to the strings is difficult to master. An equal relationship to the string makes thing a lot easier, I think.