Traditional Stick pedagogy focuses on soloing over changes, but if your instrument is set up in fourths, you can study four-part harmony and voice-leading...the other approach to composition and improvisation.

Harmony starts with a melody, hopefully a well-crafted one, and chords are constructed under it. A single melody can support several diverse, but equally musical harmonizations. When you hear ensemble music of a certain harmonic complexity, odds are this method was used to compose it.

I don't believe this is any more conceptually difficult to learn, but you must learn chord construction right out of the gate and do ear-training as well, so there is considerable work away from the instrument. In fact, the goal is to be able to write music in your head; the instrument is used initially for training and ultimately as a sketch-pad for ensemble music.

The jazz/rock crowd isn't much interested in this sort of thing, but the approach has potential for someone who takes progressive music seriously as a career. Is there anyone out there who "gets'" that substituting Stick for piano this way is undiscovered country? Are any lurkers doing this? Please report.

Mad Monk.

And you can't do that in standard tuning?

It's not absolutely impossible, but...

Four-part harmony is not just any three notes played by one hand while the other hand plays a solo. To have control over many harmonic possibilities, each of the four voices has to be free to move, acting as a melody on its own. You cannot always cover three independently moving voices in one hand, so on the Stick each hand gets two.

The real problem is that the shape of these harmonic intervals is different in fourths and in fifths. To work out how to play just one or two Bach chorales (the classic examples of four-part harmony) might be equally difficult in both tunings. But as you continue, fluency will be much harder to develop if you insist on keeping track of two different shapes for each interval. Fourths are consistent, and since dual fifths have their own problems, fourths are the simplest option.

In any case I can only recommend what I've actually been able to do myself. You definitely can play the chorales and the textbook examples in fourths.

Mad Monk.

"First you plays the melody, then you plays the melody arounds the melody,
then you plays your heart".

Satchmo

"It's like Dixie"

Jerry Garcia


*j*
.~

mad_monk: Very interesting thread:

With the Stick I have started on a task that almost requires a split personality. (I “almost” resemble that remark.)

I just received a new 10 string MR tuned stick and a new SG12 tuned to mirrored fourths. My areas of study, before the Stick, were Piano and Violin. Initially I planned on just getting either a Grand stick or an SG12 tuned to fourths. But after reading about all the advantages of 5ths/ 4ths I though I had to at least “examine” that tuning as well.

But back to your thread:
It took some time to figure out after studying piano for awhile why I still read scores so slowly. What was getting in the way is that after playing a piece only a couple of times the music so strongly sounded in my mind that I just quick played from memory and never really read the score. (Just quickly glancing at the intervals shown on the page.)

It’s a very long story. . . But the quick version is that, later in my studies, I found an exceptional piano teacher that turned what other previous teachers has labeled as a curse into an asset. We immediately started chord study and additional ear-training to take advantage of what came naturally to me.

My original interest and enthusiasm about the stick was to substitute the Stick for a piano and add more expression.
As well as explore multiple part harmony while still playing a lead/melody part.
It will admittedly take some time before I will have the “Stick skills” to implement my long term goal.

I was pleasantly surprised to run across this thread. As I may have not been too far off in my understand of what may be possible on a Stick.

>>As I may have not been too far off in my understand of what may be possible on a Stick.<<<

Anything is possible on The Stick. Much has already been explored and presented, but it's still very young with few players relatively speaking. I'm convinced that the musical possibilities on The Stick can/will surpass most other modern day instruments. Emmett has given us a great expressive tool to create sonic beauty. The (r)evolution continues every day.

Hi Dave,

I'm glad to know this resonates with you. And we can use more players who don't rely so much on the guitar as a source of inspiration.

I'm also envious of your "curse"....


Mad Monk.

Totally agree here. One of the coolest and/or frustrating things about the instrument (depending on your point of view) is that so many limitations have been designed out of the instrument. Thus requiring the player to dictate his/her own limitations.

In other words, most instruments have inherent limitations that in some way influence the type of music one creates with it. The Stick seems to me to be a totally blank slate in this regard. Although, probably not 'limitless' in an absolute sense.

I'm currently playing a straight 4ths tuning on an SB8 but have experience with the MR 10 string tuning as well. I've found both contrapuntal as well as stacked harmonic approaches to be not only possible but even intuitive in both tunings.

I really think it just comes down to the player and how they 'think' about (or want to think about) the music they want to make.

To quote Stravinsky from his book Poetics of Music: "The creator's function is to sift the elements he receives from [imagination], for human activity must impose limits on itself. The more art is controlled, limited, worked over, the more it is free."

Here's more: http://jorielle-music.blogspot.com/2005 ... ts-as.html

Traditional? From someone pretty much ignoring every rule in the book, I resist to think we can say there is a "tradition" going on here....

Back to composing, harmony/melody and tuning, I second the thought that you can do/conceive/compose any level of complex arrangements with the instrument, in any tuning. The fact that you want to play multi-layered harmonies while soloing may require to adapt your tuning, but if you ever listened (for example) to Tuck Andress (from Tuck and Patti), he achieves unbelievable harmonic combinations just with the 6 strings of his guitar...

From personal experience (specifically when arranging a piece), I often compose the harmony "over" the original melody (instead of "under") and in some cases take the original melody out, to see if I can suggest it to the listener without actually playing it. As Lisa Simpson said once, "try listening to the notes he doesn't play"....

In this thread I am referring to the academic, systematic study of harmony (and its development), which has never been open to those who don't play piano.
This textbook is a good one and is available for next to nothing in an old edition (no reflection on the quality of the text):

http://www.amazon.com/Harmony-Voice-Lea ... 511&sr=1-1

The musical examples in this book are piano scores, and the exercises are written on the grand staff. The Stick makes this very useful material accessible to string players without a lengthy detour through piano territory (i.e. a year of scales, for starters).


Mad Monk.