Hey,

Well, I seem to be having a similar experience to a lot of other newbie’s to the Chapman Stick. I’ve played guitar and bass for years completely for fun and basically to help me enhance my enjoyment of the music I love. I’ve known of the Stick for years but it has never particularly grabbed me that I can say. However, I recently got a copy of Liquid Tension Experiment’s live shows in 2008 and in sitting down to watch I just became totally enthralled with Tony Levin and his Stick playing. I’m just fascinated with the thing. As I’ve dug into this forum and the SE site a bit and learned the story of Emmett’s life’s work and this fascinating instrument he’s created I’m even more enthralled. What a fascinating story, instrumen and community !! The idea of being able to play both bass and guitar lines at the same time is exciting and terrifying at the same time….just great !!!

I’d like to ask a few questions if I could:

1) As making the jump into owning a stick is such a significant commitment the idea of giving the basic concept a try must be something people have tried. It seems to me that taking a regular scale 6 string guitar and swapping the low E and D string would basically allow you to re-tune to something close to the middle 6 strings of “Extended Alto” http://www.stick.com/instruments/tuning ... sextended/ (I tried this on my Steinberger with reasonable success…allowing for string gauges which seem a little light on the low melody strings) I realize this would be a cumbersome prototype of a thing to play….but it seems like it would be worth the effort as a tool to get my head around some of the basic concepts.

2) I come from the “Les Paul through a Marshall” school of Rock guitar sound quality. I don’t mean to say I’m a total cave man, but that FAT, saturated tone (think ZZ Top) is what a beautiful guitar sound is to me. I’ve not seen a lot of anything close to this type of tone from the Stick examples I’ve seen on the web (I don’t mean to start a YouTube quality of sound flame discussion here as most of the music seems to be of the quiet / moody and/or funky side of things (not that there is anything wrong with that) I’m just wondering if there is anything I should look for that is on the rocking and distorted side that I might find interesting ??? The idea of playing music with heavy rhythm guitar and bass type parts achieved via the two aspects of the Stick is very interesting to me…..I wonder what people have done like that already ??

Thanks !!

Welcome from another newbie (awaiting his first Stick).

The MatchSticks might be closer to the type of sound you're looking for (though the audio quality of the videos isn't the best)

http://www.youtube.com/user/thematchsticks

Welcome to the forum, it's great to have so many new people asking great questions. This might be something like what you are looking for. Here's Rick Cucuzza tearing it up:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-Q7iK8_fkM[/youtube]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-Q7iK8_fkM

And just to echo that you should listen to The Matchsticks. Here's a great example:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4STTEZMT1dk[/youtube]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4STTEZMT1dk

-Eric

YEA !!!!! FANTASTIC !!!!! I knew those types of tones should be out there Oh.....those were absolutely stupendous.....I am IN !!!

Thank You....I will now continue to dig deeper into this outstanding idea \m/

and don't forget this one - my favorite:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6rt1XaGmzs[/youtube]

Nick Beggs rules!

also checkout Guitarresque on Greg Howard's album SOL. He has some amazing distortion effects and playing during the solo.

Hey Don,

Welcome. Playing clean bass with one hand and distorted lead with the other is one really fun aspect of The Stick.

I've got several episodes of this in different videos, but you usually have to wait through some undistorted segments to get to it. It's mostly in the context of lead and bass together though, so I apologize if this is just self-promotion rather than examples of what you're looking for:

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

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rup0ZzEyPmQ[/youtube]

Also, if you want better sound quality, this one has some nice fuzzed out moments, Quicktime:

http://www.stick.com/onlinevideos/bigbang.html

Here's another of Giancarlo's, "Revolution"
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhHX2_U07XM[/youtube]

As far as I know he's just got a regular Stickup on his instrument. Great sounds.

...and thanks to Randy for the mention. The two tune on Sol that has a lot of distortion is "The Crossing," however.

ok, ok - Greg's right!

Greg,

Thank you. Those are very tasty !! Clearly what I thought should be out there was somewhere...I just hadn't found it. (Side note...I found your version of All Blues today to and LOVED it....particularly the bass sound...such a lovely GROWLY bass tone...wonderful Thanks again !!

..... and the Syeeda's Song Flute rendition has me over the moon too....for asking a "where's the rock?" question I've been pulling out all my Jazz tunes and loving it Awesome....Music rules !!!

Thinking along these lines about saturated tones has got me wondering about the pickup systems on these instruments. Electric guitars get so much of their sonic character from their pickups. In most of these videos I've been watching I seem to notice the Stickup set-up...which isn't an option for the Graphite (my personal favorite.....I have a "carbon fiber" festish.) In my reading I take the ACTV-2 to be a more "Single Coil" style of pickup system while the PASV-4 would be a more "Humbucker" style choice when fully engaged (I realize those are pretty liberal generalizations...but I'd have to make an A/B choice and in the end I'm a Humbucker sound guy much more so than a single coil sound guy and the PASV-4 has more tonal control options so it strikes me as more flexible choice) I realize the longer scale length and lower string tension would play major factors in the final tone....but the same basic principles would apply from a typical guitar I imagine.