It wasn't meant to be a Christmas present, but after 5 months of waiting, I finally got my new Chapman Stick.

I had ordered a new 12-string Grand with active electronics and the stick modified Roland GK-2 pickup on the melody side. Tarara wood and it's beautiful.

I had borrowed a friends old stick to start practicing with. I can't believe how much better the new one feels and plays. The old one needs a setup bad.

Anyway, I'm happy, or at least I will be when I get better at playing it

jw

I guess I'm going to show my ignorance here but oh well. I've seen a Chapman Stick mentioned in other posts and I'm extremeley curious.

What the hell is a Chapman Stick anyway?????????????

Really difficult to explain...the best idea is to do a search on it, and go to the website and see for yourself. I believe it's played by some sort of tapping method.

Check out http://www.stick.com. It has 12 strings, with the highest 6 tuned in descending 4ths. The bass side goes up in 5ths. You play it with both hands at the same time by tapping. You can play bass and guitar lines at the same time. Tony Levin has played one for years.

jw

yeah! i have seen them before. and i have a lot of questions. i guess it should sound like a guitar, but without the picking, wich is the 50% of the guitar sound. how is the feel of the instrument? how difficult is to get used to it? can you do slides, bends and that sort of things?? how good is the midi pickup in the instrument??

Can you talk more about it??

Thanks

Congratulations, John! Have fun with your new toy! I'm sure you'll have hours and hours of fun working on it. It is certainly a difficult instrument to master.

It's pretty hard to get used to. On the guitar, both hands work together to produce a note. On the stick, each hand is playing independently, like a keyboard.

The bass strings are strung backwards from a bass which also causes some mental glitches.

You can slide and bend with ease. The MIDI pickup is the standard Roland GK-2, adapted for the string spacing. I had heard that it didn't track the bass very vell, so I only had it put on the 6 melody strings. Seems to track very fast. A lot of Stick players are starting to experiment with the VG-88. Should be interesting. I'll have to track one down to try.

jw