I found this today at BookBuyers in Mountain View. It looks like original pieces by the late Frank Jolliffe.

I don't have a stick yet, but I'm awfully tempted to buy this.


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Frank was an amazing jazz player.

Unfortunately, the term touchstyle is the douchebaggery of those trying to re-brand or re-invent what Emmett had already invented, documented and published.

Although, I'd be lying if I didn't state I was at least curious...

I have that book, it is based on transcriptions from Franks recordings.
Nice music, very useful for a stick student, especially if you can find the record too.

Yeah, sorry Gene. I only recently learned via PM from another Stickist why this might be a sore subject--I honestly didn't know. I just saw a stick-related book and got excited. :/


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"Unfortunately, the term touchstyle is the douchebaggery of those trying to re-brand or re-invent what Emmett had already invented, documented and published."

If you knew Frank at all you'd realize that this never was his agenda.

Can we please have an explanation here? I made an internet search on "touch guitar" and found David Bunker to be be the first one, building his prototype in the fifties (took him eight years). I can't believe Gene is pointing out this guy as a "douchebag", so what is this all about? Bunker was a decade earlier than Emmett and it's not even touching (!) the Free Hands(R) playing technique.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6L6wzWolI00[/youtube]

Dave bunkers developments were great, and quite different from Emmett's.

Emmett's "Free Hands" put an instrument in an almost vertical position, which "freed" the hands to play with an ease which is almost unique. Mr. Bunker was a horizonal tapper, which while very cool is much more limiting. The vertical postioning of the instrument was the EUREKa development for what we do. Everyone who plays a stringed instruments with 2 hands playing perpendicular to the strings, with ergonomic ease is using Emmett's "Free Hands" method.

There have been a few folks who over the years have downplayed Emmett's role in the discovery and development of this method, I believe it is the those people Gene was referring.
"Touchstyle" was just a term they used to replace Emmett's term "Free Hands" .

So some people waged a war against giving Emmett credit and there was anger.
I see no need to flare up the fight again, Dave bunker was great and had nothing to do with Emmett's method. Frank was a great player, he moved away from sticks to other "freehands" designed instuments, and those builders gave it a new name.

It was Emmett who gave us the gift of playing in the way we do. Credit where it is due.

Brett

Totally agree, Brett! I have no idea who is the hidden douchebag, referred to earlier in this thread, but isn't it obvious that the newcomers like Warr, U8 and the ZiggyTapper (oh, almost forgot the Traktor hacks) all rely on the Free Hands way of playing the instrument? I mean, everyone can see that just by watching. But are they really "douchebags"? I bet a lot of this boils down to someone simply being ignorant in making business. Lacking knowledge is not evil.

Per, it goes way back before Bunker. The first documented two-handed tapper was Harry DeArmond, who developed the technique to show off the sensitivity of the pickups he designed. He taught it to Jimmy Webster, who worked for Gretch. Webster inspired Bunker to build his instruments. They all played compete song arrangements on guitars, tapping with both hands, but with the right hand fingers parallel to the strings, not the frets, as shown in the video of Bunker you mentioned.

After Emmett's tuning patent expired in the mid 1990s, instruments based on his method and tuning started to appear, and were marketed using Touchstyle as the name of the playing method, even though Emmett never used this term. They tried to claim that Webster and Bunker were the source of the method, even though they used a different right hand orientation. That's where the "douchbagery" (Gene's term) comes in, because they were all Stick players, all of them direct students of Emmett, and they knew where the method they used came from, and that it was different from DeArmond's method, which they didn't use. Emmett called his method Free Hands or just "two-handed tapping", but never used the term Touchstyle.

By many accounts Frank was a good guy, and my take on it is that he was lead down the primrose path into lending the name he came up with, "Touchstyle" (after "fingerstyle") to the effort to market these competing instruments, perhaps not realizing what the implications were.

It would be great if this thread about Frank's book didn't turn into a thread about the nefariousness of others. Rest in Peace, Frank.

If you want to read more about the origins of various approaches to two-handed tapping, check out these links:

http://www.stick.com/method/Free_Hands/
http://www.stick.com/articles/evolution/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_DeArmond

Sorry about interrupting, but I had to ask when things I didn't know about was referred to. I get it now