Picking up Chapman Stick?

[MultiScaleMale]

I kinda wish they would make a 9 string Stick Bass to use with their Dual Bass Reciprocal tuning. The "melody side" would be regular EADG from the middle out like a normal bass guitar and the "bass side" would be Stick fifths tuning from the middle out BF#C#G#D#. So, 4 strings on the melody side, 5 on the bass side and then you have the low B that could still be used along with the EADG side to effectively be a 5 string. That would make "learning" the instrument quick for people that already know electric bass. Then you just learn some of the fifths tuning idioms and you're quickly at a point where you can use it for some songs. You could do similar with just an 8 string Stick Bass, but you lose some of the upper notes that are cool for double stops. A 10 string Grand would be a reasonable solution, just adding a high C on the melody side, I guess.

 

[Mickp]

I have to disagree with much of what's been said here. Playing Stick like Bob Culbertson or Greg Howard, yeah, that's hard. Playing bass like Jaco is hard too. Playing Stick as well or better than I play bass = not that hard. Actually, easier, since practice is more fun (for me) and having 6 (or even 8) fingers to actually hit notes makes playing fast or complex bass lines way easier.
If you don't like the bass tuning in 5ths, then get it in 4ths (or change it yourself). The SB8 Stick bass comes that way standard.

If you're gigging in a band, having a Stick guarantees attention and interest from at least some of the punters.
I can even play a simple baseline with one hand and tamborine with the other (eg. Cover versions of Lumineers songs) - that gets attention too, especially when I hit it on my head .

Yeah, it does have a sound that is not exactly "like a bass", or a guitar (but you can get close enough that 99.99% of the population won't notice), but nor does a fretless bass, or an acoustic, or a Rickie .

Here are mine..left is Padauk 10 string, standard tuning, center is Grand Railboard, also standard, and right is the SB8 Stick bass.

 

[Joshua Pickenpaugh]

I owned a Grand Stick for many years, and they are some of the most well-made instruments you can find. Emmett and Yuta are fantastic to work with, hands down.

I sold mine since I had never really taken the time required to learn it, and I needed a new bass. Plus, there is already one of the best CS-ists here in town, Trevor Stewart.

 

[mp40smg]

For reference.. this is mine..
Motivated seller

 

[bholder]

For reference.. this is mine..
Motivated sellerView attachment 4195186

Looks just like mine!

 

[Bob_Ross]

Emmett Chapman once said that it would be better to start out NOT knowing guitar or bass.

I figured playing guit@r and bass, it would be the perfect instrument for me -but really it isn't like either of those instruments and must be approached entirely as a new instrument in its own right.

Back when I still had my Stick I once did a jam with my drummer where we swapped instruments. I'm a competent drummer (or at least was at the time), he was a percussion whiz with very modest piano skills who had never played guitar or bass...and he killed that Stick! I mean, yeah, his playing was completely atonal, a harmonic mess, but for a guy who had literally never touched the instrument before in his life, within 30 seconds he was grooving harder and more compellingly than anything I'd ever managed to coax out of the Stick in the previous ~9 months.

 

[Sid Fang]

One further Stick-y note. When I bought my Stick circa 1982, it came in a hardshell case lined with what seemed to be a good quality plastic foam that had been cut to hold the stick securely and isolate it from shock. Somewhere between about 2005 and 2010, the foam suddenly and completely degenerated. I opened the case in 2010 after several years of ignoring it, and discovered that the foam had collapsed into a layer of goo covering the instrument. Took hours and hours of work to clean it off. Fortunately, it doesn't seem to have gotten into the electronics. But those of you who still have those cases in your closets: You have been warned.

 

[Pauly 4001]

I picked up Chapman Stick in 1986, after I'd been playing bass for a dozen years.
Long story short, I sold the Stick in 1991. There were four factors that contributed to my losing interest in the instrument ...well, five if you include the fact that I am habitually lazy and never practice any instrument as much as I should:

1) The reciprocal fifths tuning lends itself to a lot of interesting music because of melodic and intervallic patterns that fall easily under the fingers...but it also is an obstacle to executing other types of melodic and intervallic patterns, and that became a bit of a liability. The Stick all too easily can coerce one to play certain types of passages, while making certain other types of passages physically awkward (E.g., lots of whole-tone or chromatic music, especially those that involve intervals of 4 half-steps, don't lie under a single hand comfortable unless you've got the wingspan of an albatross). Sadly, at the time I was playing the Stick I was involved in an ensemble whose material all seemed to fall into that latter category!

2) There is a character -- or, I would argue, a lack of character -- to the upper half of the instrument (the "melody" strings, the ones traditionally tuned in fourths) that I have never heard any Stick player, regardless of how experienced and/or virtuosic, overcome. To my ear this is inherent in the instrument, a result of both the tapping gesture combined with the construction materials and electronics of the Stick. I couldn't get past how unengaging that sound was, and so I rarely if ever used a good 50% of the instrument's capabilities. (In hindsight, if they had made the bass-only version of the Stick in 1986, that would have been a better choice for achieving my musical objectives.)

3) Tony Levin's voice on the instrument is so distinctive, and so appealing, that after a few years I realized that all I was using the Stick for was to emulate Tony! That kinda defeats the whole point of being a musician.

4) The instrument I owned was one of the polycarbonate models, which were notorious for not holding their tuning. Of course, I didn't realize that was an issue with all polycarbonate Sticks when I owned mine, I just thought either I had a lemon or my ears were turning to poo.

Anyway, it was a fascinating experience, and I do still love some Stick players (especially Tony Levin) but recognizing it wasn't the right fit for my musical goals was one of the best decisions I ever made.

Here's me in 1987, before the bloom was off the rose:
View attachment 4194273

I didn't realize for a while what was happening with my polycarbonate stick: I would take it out of the case and a couple strings would have made big slips on tuning. I sold it to a guy who initiated the trade and he later confirmed that the polycarb material split under the individual screws which constituted the bridge/saddles and that Emmitt Chapman was aware of the instability and gave him a good deal on the trade in. I felt bad and am afraid he thought I was pulling a fast one on him.

One further Stick-y note. When I bought my Stick circa 1982, it came in a hardshell case lined with what seemed to be a good quality plastic foam that had been cut to hold the stick securely and isolate it from shock. Somewhere between about 2005 and 2010, the foam suddenly and completely degenerated. I opened the case in 2010 after several years of ignoring it, and discovered that the foam had collapsed into a layer of goo covering the instrument. Took hours and hours of work to clean it off. Fortunately, it doesn't seem to have gotten into the electronics. But those of you who still have those cases in your closets: You have been warned.

I discovered that 15 or so years ago but I really should figure out where the early ironwood grand Stick is at the moment and how it's being stored.

 

[MultiScaleMale]

I didn't realize for a while what was happening with my polycarbonate stick: I would take it out of the case and a couple strings would have made big slips on tuning. I sold it to a guy who initiated the trade and he later confirmed that the polycarb material split under the individual screws which constituted the bridge/saddles and that Emmitt Chapman was aware of the instability and gave him a good deal on the trade in. I felt bad and am afraid he thought I was pulling a fast one on him.

My first real bass was early in my bass playing "career", a Steinberger XM-2TT with the no trussrod neck. I was in the Army and it was stored in my wall locker, in the gig bag, leaning up against the neck. After storing it that way (and playing it) for about a year I read something about setups and looked down the side of the fretboard and noticed a slight curve. I thought I broke it by leaning it up against the neck, not knowing that a fingerboard should have some relief built in when there is no truss rod.

 

[Pauly 4001]

One further Stick-y note. When I bought my Stick circa 1982, it came in a hardshell case lined with what seemed to be a good quality plastic foam that had been cut to hold the stick securely and isolate it from shock. Somewhere between about 2005 and 2010, the foam suddenly and completely degenerated. I opened the case in 2010 after several years of ignoring it, and discovered that the foam had collapsed into a layer of goo covering the instrument. Took hours and hours of work to clean it off. Fortunately, it doesn't seem to have gotten into the electronics. But those of you who still have those cases in your closets: You have been warned.

YIKES!
So after your timely warning I located my other Stick behind the furnace in its case:

It's the bubinga version and using brushes knocked off the worst of it but those strings will never recover. I do have a spare set around.
Thanks for the warning/reminder!!!!

 

[Pauly 4001]

And of course I have to acknowledge that it's really a pathetic state of affairs to not know where your other Stick is and then to find it in such a state.
Maybe other Stick owners are in a similar situation so let my tale be a graphic warning to you all.
Beyond that, I even misidentified the number of strings on each Stick.
Truly sad.

 

[devnulljp]

Well, after all this discussion, I found a 10 string stick locally. Picked it up yesterday.
Set up for double bass reciprocal tuning so I can at least kinda get a tune out of it without too much struggle.
But you're right, it is a different animal to anything I've ever played before. Learning curve looks steep. Can't see me getting paid to play this thing any time soon, but it could be fun.

 

[Sid Fang]

Well, after all this discussion, I found a 10 string stick locally. Picked it up yesterday.
Set up for double bass reciprocal tuning so I can at least kinda get a tune out of it without too much struggle.
But you're right, it is a different animal to anything I've ever played before. Learning curve looks steep. Can't see me getting paid to play this thing any time soon, but it could be fun.

Excellent! Enjoy yourself. Are you running into some kind of mixer or are you individually amping the two channels? I had a near-religious experience a few years ago when I brought my Stick to a jam. I plugged the bass strings into my EBS Drome bass combo and the treble strings into a Tech21 Trademark 30. I stumbled onto some overdrive setting on the Tech21 that was perfectly insane - something closer to Hendrix than to Fripp, but swelling, wailing sustain that still somehow didn't pick up noise from the bass strings. Never been able to reproduce that sound! Someone on this thread mentioned that it was impossibile to get the treble strings to sound as distinctive as the bass strings, and I know where they're coming from, but they're wrong.

 

[devnulljp]

Excellent! Enjoy yourself. Are you running into some kind of mixer or are you individually amping the two channels? I had a near-religious experience a few years ago when I brought my Stick to a jam. I plugged the bass strings into my EBS Drome bass combo and the treble strings into a Tech21 Trademark 30. I stumbled onto some overdrive setting on the Tech21 that was perfectly insane - something closer to Hendrix than to Fripp, but swelling, wailing sustain that still somehow didn't pick up noise from the bass strings. Never been able to reproduce that sound! Someone on this thread mentioned that it was impossibile to get the treble strings to sound as distinctive as the bass strings, and I know where they're coming from, but they're wrong.

Very early days yet, so I've just been using the stereo-to-mono cable and trying to find my way around it. I still have a splitter box I built when I had a Rick, so plan would be to use that to take the two sides out to different FX, channels or amps. But it's set up bass register on both sides, and I don't really have treble strings, so wouldn't be as obvious a way to go as with standard tuning with the two ends going into different amps.

I used to do a bit of that Billy Sheehan EVH-type fingerboard tapping, but this is a completely different thing. Already have some ideas for how to integrate into one of the projects I play with, but nowhere close to being able to do it yet.

Do you guys use a lot of compression with it to even out the sound?

 

[Sid Fang]

Do you guys use a lot of compression with it to even out the sound?

Funny you should ask. I bought a compressor pedal almost immediately after getting the Stick, for exactly that reason, but I set it aside pretty quickly and got used to tapping with appropriate force.

 

[bholder]

Funny you should ask. I bought a compressor pedal almost immediately after getting the Stick, for exactly that reason, but I set it aside pretty quickly and got used to tapping with appropriate force.

Yeah I thought the sound was already compressed-sounding, the usual criticism of limited dynamic range being not entirely untrue...

 

[Mickp]

Compression = up to you. Tony Levin uses a TON of compression with StickMen for example. Personally, I use some, depending on the context, but it's worth while to work on dynamic range.
Congratulations - that's nice looker! The dual bass reciprocal is an interesting option. Just have fun!!

 

[devnulljp]

How do you play this thing sitting down?

 

[MultiScaleMale]

How do you play this thing sitting down?

They have a little stick thing where the belt clip hooks into it, or you wear a loose belt and let it sag.

 

[Bob_Ross]

How do you play this thing sitting down?

They have a little stick thing where the belt clip hooks into it, or you wear a loose belt and let it sag.

Just be sure to sit at the very front edge of the chair so the Stick can hang down between your legs.