[CheshireCat]

What do you guys think of Touch Style Guitar, like Stick and Warr?

[Brent]

If I could actually *hear* what one sounded like I might be able to form an opinion. ...but right now it just looks like another gimmick to me.

Brent

[Playn4God]

ummm, explain to me what a touch style guitar is, i havent heard of one!!

[LWatford]

You probably have heard one. Alot of the time when Tony Levin plays on a track, it is on a stick. Alot of '80s bass lines were done on a stick. It has a very "throaty", "barking" sound. I think the sitckwire page has some sound samples, Greg Howard's site has samples, and Bob Culbertson's site might (I don't remember). I don't think you can call touch-style guitar a gimmick, since people have been tapping guitars since the '50s. The stick came about in the late '60s.

Lee

[mesabooger]

Check out my post in "other instruments", I have a link to the Chapman stick webpage. I want one!

[Basszilla]

Originally posted by CheshireCat
What do you guys think of Touch Style Guitar, like Stick and Warr?

I really want one.

Originally posted by Brent
If I could actually *hear* what one sounded like I might be able to form an opinion. ...but right now it just looks like another gimmick to me.

Check out http://www.stickmusic.com/html/popular.html
it has a few good sound clips of an unaccompanied stick, so you can really hear how it sounds. Warr guitars sound very similar.


Kevin

[CheshireCat]

Guess what! I just saw Bob Culbertson yesterday! He plays at the Cottonwood ArtsFestival every year in Richardson as an exhibiter. All he does is play and he sells CD's like hot-cakes. Most people have never seen a Stick and they are fascinated with it.

Emmett Chapman developed the Stick in 1974, after stumbling onto the Touch style in the late 60's. He originally was a Jazz Guitarist - in a sense, he still is - and was into all sorts of weird stuff, putting every kind of new fangled do-dad on his guitar. The last guitar he had before developing the stick could easily go on the "Weird Guitars and Basses" thread. By that point, he was up to nine strings.

Along with his experimenting, looking for different sounds, he did a fair amount of two-hand tapping. It was then that he came across the Crossed method of playing, where in you fret the strings across the board, approaching the strings from the other side of the fretboard. Emmett restrung his guitar, grouping the strings into two seperate groupings, one Bass, and one Melody, and orienting them from lowest to highest in each group from the center out to the outside.

Your left hand then hovers over the left grouping while tapping the right grouping, and your right hand hovers over the right grouping while tapping the left grouping. Sounds counter-intuitive but it is in fact quite easy and effective and allows for a great deal of versatility.

So imagine on a 12-string Grand Stick a 6-string bass and a 6-string guitar side by side, with narrow spacing, and the bass strings in reverse order as if it were string for a left-handed person?

Let's see, I should have a picture.

Anyway, that's basically the touch method. With the cross strings orientation, you fully maximize the playing style.

Definitely not a gimmick.

Chesh

[Avalanche 126]

guys, what exactly is a warr guitar????? and the other 2???????

[CheshireCat]

www.warrguitars.com

Check it out! *grin*

What other two?

Chesh

[Avalanche 126]

im sorry i didnt mean to make it sound like 2 other guitars, i meant in addition to the warr guitar, i was refering to the stick, but thanx for the info.