I've had my new NS/Stick for a whopping 3 days, so take this with a grain of salt. Never having actually played one, it's easy to have misconceptions.

So, my "idea" of what an NS/Stick was to be used for was sort of a way to help me with my improv-looping technique. Lay down lines, loop, repeat. I use Ableton Live in conjunction with Mobius. If you've read discriptions of Per's rig, that's close to what I'm doing. Eventually I hoped to become proficient in the dual independent hand technique, but in the mean time I thought I'd lay down a bass line, a rhythm, play leads over, etc.

And on some level, all that's going swimmingly. I'm able to pick things up pretty quickly and the technique's starting to make sense to me in fits and starts... that is, until I try to play a higher gain lead sound. That seems to be a disaster. There seems to be so much extraneous Stick noise that those types of sounds just don't work. It just ends up sounding like noisy mud. The best I've done so far is to use a low gain sound with an ebow.

I got the idea that I could do this from watching this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wDCIpC5mYs

at 4:38 the solo starts... now I realize that he had a Roland GK equipped model (I wanted to buy it but it didn't work out! ) and was probably triggering some flavor of Roland synth with it. Now it occurs to me that pretty much all the recordings and videos I've seen feature a clean sound.

I guess my question is, am I doing something wrong, or was I wrong to assume the NS/Stick could be used like this. I feel a bit stupid because I was hoping for sounds like I heard from people like Trey Gun and guys in his band, but, of course, he uses a Warr. Silly me, I just assumed the Warr was a very similar instrument made by another company, like a Les Paul compared to a Stratocaster.

Either way, but if you can't do a high gain lead sound I'm a little disappointed but it may just be that "the spoon doesn't bend, it is YOU that bends" and all I need is to rethink what can be done with this instrument.

the emg pickups are telecaster - ish you can see the
emg web link here ...

http://www.emgpickups.com/products/index/247/255/1

i've heard some high gain lead sounds on the NS (don schiff's peering over clouds may have some examples ?) so you can do it but you may have to tinker differently that you're used to..

you can hear a smidgen of some "high gain lead" in this clip

http://www.thetank.com/mp3/donschiff_po ... ds_pre.mp3

I recommend getting Don's CD, it's a cornucopia of NS sonic goodness ..

Indeed that sounds like a triggered synth, but there's no reason you shouldn't be able to get a smooth distortion higher gain lead sound (Stick players have been doing that for years), just a combination of tweaking and possibly technique as well, often an amp/effects setting that sounds great for a guitar might not translate to the NS.

Others will likely have more and better advice but in general I try to use as little compression as possible for these kinds of sounds, and I cut out a lot of high end (since Stick and NS pickups provide more high frequencies than regular guitar pickups, it can sound a bit shrill when distorted without EQ or tone modification). Both of these can help minimize extra noise and loss of definition. After a while you should be able to get a sense of what EQ helps (both pre and post distortion).

I was able to get part way there using a "eq pedal" (virtual in Amplitube 3) but while that solved the brightness issue I can't seem to find a way around the pickup cross talk/body noise issue as easily.

I have both an SB8 and a Warr TGSS 8. I would say that your Les Paul vs Strat analogy is pretty good... at least with regard to sound. Actually, other than sound I would say that they're not very similar at all. From my own experience I would give two bits of advice:

1) When I started on these instruments I RADICALLY underestimated how lightly I needed to play. With the action set exceptionally low, gain turned up a bit higher, and with a much lighter touch than one would normally use to tap a conventional guitar or bass, I get little to no extraneous noise and a far greater dynamic range. It's definitely an adjustment worth working on.

2) Most effect units (physical or virtual) are designed for the frequency range of either a conventional guitar OR bass but not both. So some experimentation is mandatory.

Also, if you're interested in Trey Gunn's sound you should know that even though his axe is also MIDI equipped, I've read a relatively recent interview where he said that he doesn't use MIDI much any more. Apparently he's only using audio signal processing via a laptop. I know... crazy huh? For what it's worth, I've gotten similar types of sounds with heavy use of Pitch Shifters and Harmonic Synthesizers.

I'd keep working on it and just know from someone who play's both instruments (I've sampled the NS/Stick as well)... it's not the axe .

I've been using Guitar Rig for processing my Stick for quite a while. Something I do is put a high pass (low cut) filter as the first item in the melody side signal path and roll off the bottom end. This helps a lot in reducing the low string bleed-thru. With hardware you could try a graphic eq pedal.
,

I've been shelving off the highs and the lows a bit, but I think you're right here. I need to get more aggressive and bandpass it a bit. Maybe I'll try a parked wah on it as I'm fond of that sound for guitar as well. Thanks for the tip.

Yeah, I'm learning this too, though it's harder to get meat hands to put into practice. I do feel that part of my issue is that my string mute isn't engaged enough. Last night I experimented and put a small strip of cardboard under it. The extra little push made a big difference, though I'm still getting some noise even from my hand moving against the back of the neck and body as if there was a piezo in the body.



I'm running it in stereo and passing the bass strings to Amplitube's bass amps and melody string to guitar amps. I think I need to try more bandpassing with the melody strings, pre pre amp though.



That's interesting! I know a lot of purests would bristle at the idea of doing this, but I've been using amp sims both hardware and software for years with good results. The amount of flexibility is amazing, and once you set up your laptop correctly I find them to be really stable. I wonder what software Trey is using...



I know I have a long way to go technique wise, but I also think there's something to be said that if you go on Youtube and type in NS Stick you get a long list of videos and not one I've found so far shows someone using a higher gain or even mildly overdriven lead sound. All clean and chimey. Using the ebow I've gotten more or less what I was hoping for, so that's a work-around. I'll keep at it. Maybe I'll be some sort of pioneer... I've always thought I was an idiot-savant of sorts, without the savant part of course.

I have had no problems getting high-gain lead sounds out of my NS/STICk.

I use a Line Six XP Pro rack module that can process two independant signals at once. I send the bass side out two a tube bass pre-amp and a 4x10. I send the high side out too a tube guitar pre-amp and a 4x12.

I then boost the gain on the lead channel only inside the line-six and crank up the guitar-pre. Then I send the lead side out to a whammy and a wah pedel.

When you don't need the crazy lead sounds, just flip it back into mono and the whole thing comes out the bass side.

Best of Luck,

Dr. Froth

Can you post an example? I tried more or less the exact set up you described though with software instead of a hardware amp modeler. I can get a high gain lead sound, it's just not a clear one.