Want To Have More Fun Playing Music? Try The Chapman Stick!
Apr 22nd, 2008 by PFBlog
Playing music can be simpler than you might imagine.
And what if I told you that you could learn to make music in a new way, and it would be like playing bass and guitar at the same time … but it would be faster than learning to play a guitar or a piano?
I’m about to tell you that very thing.
But first, let’s think about how a guitar works. The guitar as we know it will play.
You strum/pick the string to make it vibrate. The lower end of the string attaches to a hollow box, which then vibrates to make the sound loud enough to hear. Back in those days, there were no metal strings, and so the guitar wasn’t really very loud. So the Spanish musicians tuned one of the strings different from the others to make strumming all the strings easier to do with the common chords they used.
And they also thumped and banged on the body of the guitar. We call this Flamenco music. But the point is, all this open-string strumming and banging on the box were simply done to overcome the fact that … these early guitars weren’t very loud.
But in our time we have electric amplifiers. We don’t need a hollow body on the instrument. We don’t need to strum all the strings at once. We don’t need to bang on the body of the instrument.
Because with an electric amplifier, simply by tapping the string to the fret, the tiny sound can be made as loud as you want.
This also means that you don’t need to use your second hand to pick the strings.
You can now play an electric guitar or bass by tapping. That means that you can play with both hands simultaneously.
This is the revolution of the Touch-Style method. And with two hands playing, you’re on the road to making twice as much music!
This can be done on a normal electric guitar or bass, assuming you set the strings low to the fretboard. But what if you had <a href=”http://www.megatar.com/english/models/TrueTapper/Dragon/dragon.html” title=”two sets of strings on one wide neck”>an instrument with *two* sets of strings</a>? For example, one set of bass strings, and another set of guitar strings?
With both bass and guitar strings on one wide fretboard, you could tap bass notes with one hand, and you could tap guitar notes with the other hand. Does such a thing exist?
You bet. Both the Chapman Stick or the Mobius Megatar instruments allow this two-handed tapping approach. It’s like playing a piano, but you’re playing bass and guitar at the same time.
The Chapman Stick folks developed their instrument first, but be aware that they have an unusual bass-strings tuning, and not everybody learns it very quickly. The Mobius Megatar instrument is of a later design, and they recommend a tuning that will be familiar to any bass player or guitar player. And with this familiar tuning and the <a href=”http://www.megatar.com/english/accessories/Learning/learning.html” title=”faster learning and more fun!”>surprisingly easier method</a> they developed, learning speed doubles!
But realize that a tuning can be changed. So if you got a Stick with their unusual tuning, you could simply change it to the easier-to-learn tuning.
In a later article, I’ll discuss how to use the more-familiar tuning to get more than double the learning speed. That will have you making music twice as fast! And … it’s twice the fun!
