From an opposite coast, welcome!

Thanks for the welcomes, everyone.



Looking forward to a BASC get-together. There will indeed be one hundred videos, although it may take more than 100 days to get there based on some upcoming travel. So far, I'm at Day 5 and counting.

I bought the stick from the original owner who lives in North Carolina. I'm not sure if Greg had anything to do with it other than the owner sending along Greg's DVD. It is a 2006 Rosewood Grand with no inlays. It came with a treble side MIDI pickup as well (not installed). He may have ordered the stick without the inlays to experiment as the instrument arrived strung as a 10 string and a spare used string set indicated he put the lowest string on the outside (at least for that set).

Based on my very limited experience, it does seem that if the goal is to speed the transition from bass or guitar to stick, copying guitar inlay patterns and tuning both sides in fourths would help. However, my goal is to really learn the stick as it was designed and I'm willing to have some short term pain to uncover the long term advantages of the 4ths/5ths tuning. A close friend went through a similar transition from guitar to clawhammer banjo. He is very glad he stuck with standard tuning even though it was harder at first. I am currently missing the top treble side string; a new string set should be arriving from SE in the next day or so.

I bought a set of linear faux abalone stickers and placed them in the normal stick locations. They are a bit thin and I may end up adding another strip to each just to make them more visible. You can see them in the Day 4 and Day 5 videos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MB8qwjX1WMw

I am struggling with the 17th fret inlay location because it is not an octave above the 7th fret, which throws off my position shifts if I am moving on a single string up an octave. I think the advantages are just unclear to me right now, but will become apparent as I play more - probably having something to do with the relationship between hands. It could also be that you don't tend to use the full range of a single string on the stick based on LH/RH ergonomics. Again, only Day 5 now, so I'll exercise patience while the intricacies of the instrument reveal themselves. Posts on this forum about the the inlay patterns definitely help.

Hi Ben, that's super cool to hear about all that and I'm really pumped for your 100 day challenge and what you'll get out of it, as well as your open minded attitude to the 4ths/5ths tuning.

For me, the biggest advantage to having the inlays where they are is that it separates the stick into 4 more or less even quadrants of 4ths, meaning that every shape within one octave will occur exactly the same way on exactly the same relative frets in each quadrant.

For example, if quad I begins on the first inlay, quad II on the 2nd inlay and so on, then your 1 octave pentatonic shape starting right on the inlay denoting quad III looks like this:



will be the same shape in quad II one string higher and include all the same fingering and same shape relative to the beginning of quad II:



The mirrored interval nature of the 4ths/5ths tuning means that every shape you learn is applicable on either side, one just has to account for the octave flips in the 5ths tuning.

Thanks, Josh. I understand your post from a "book learnin" standpoint, but haven't internalized the relationships.

These are the relationships I have observed so far in classic 4ths/5ths tuning.

Single string: each inlay is a P4

Across strings:
Bass side - moving one inlay up and one string towards my right is an octave
Treble side - moving one inlay up and one string towards my right is a unison

Across hands:
The relationships change by string to string comparison because of the 4ths/5ths tuning.

For example, on the same inlay, moving from the inner strings to the outer strings on each hand, the interval decreases by a whole step. D on the lowest bass string would be paired with Eb on the lowest melody string for a b9. If each hand moves one string up in pitch, the relation changes to A and Ab, or a major 7th. Following this pattern, there would be a 6th, a 5th, a 4th, and a flat 3rd.

There is an octave relationship between the 4th from lowest bass string and the 5th from bottom treble string one inlay up.

Yeah, everything you've observed is correct. Classic tuning will force you to adjust by a whole step between the two sides, a part of why I appreciate matched reciprocal tuning as much as I do

But the core of my first comment I suppose is that the quadrants really help reduce the perceived size of the fretboard when you start to see how the patterns repeat from Quadrant to quadrant

Would you like me to post a “fret map” for you, like the one I just updated (doing my best to correct clef placement) for Bob's Expanded Alto?



By the way, I made one with an Alto Clef for giggles:

...wow, how impressive...
...but what can we learn on such complex diagrams?...
...what have you learnt with this?...
...IMHO, it seems the construcion of a paper like this is the main part of the learning...

The primary benefit of that most recent work is that I began to think about Stick tunings and scale lengths with regard to tessitura, most especially my forthcoming Alto Stick in the context of the Alto Clef. As exemplified by Emmett's wheel charts for his Offset Modal System, among other forms of data visualization, contextualizing information in new ways enables one to process that information differently—recruiting more of one's brain and increasing the likelihood of meaningful learning.

Engaging my mind differently, with regard to Bob's Expanded Alto tuning and the ranges of frets which are likely to be comfortable to my hands, led me to imagine my forthcoming Stick's role in an ensemble—starting with my former grade-school band and ending with Stick duets. The fact that I am unlikely to form such ensembles is irrelevant: I began to integrate new information (i.e. various aspects of the Alto Stick) with my existing knowledge, a technique which greatly increases the likelihood of meaningful learning. One could think of this as the musical equivalent of walking around a race track prior to driving.

The diagrams are cool, although I must confess it took me some time to understand the orientation. IMHO, more material is good material, even if it doesn't click for me right now, it could be useful for someone else, or for me later.