Stick Blog #1
Well, I’ve been playing the stick for a week, and have probably clocked up about 3 hours in total. It’s a graphite (with no sounding body, who needs wood?) 10 string tuned in the classic tuning, with fret rails, flaps, and the amazing sounding PASV4 Villex passive pickup matrix.
It’s a fascinating instrument, not for any of the obvious reasons.
First of all, yes, it can do all those sticky bass sounds that tony levin made popular, and with the appropriate little phaser pedal (MXR 90) and a bunch of opto compression ‘i don’t remember’ or ‘hells half acre’ come stomping out with little trouble and ease; Big Time is great fun, and the solo from one slip is just a tube compressor and a svt model away;
as long as you retune your bass strings to ascending 4ths.
What did you say? You mean its standard tuning isn’t 4ths? Yes. The classic and matched reciprocal tunings call for ascending 5ths in the bass…because that’s what the stick is actually about. Its a system for exploring polyphony and voicing. Everything Emmett has created is geared towards a key neutral instrument with the same fingering patterns across both dimensions of the fretboard. It’s perfectly natural on the stick to play parallel 10ths, and it sounds spacious and beautiful and creates no discomfort. Emmetts method calls for ascending 5ths in the bass strings rather than 4ths, and this means that it becomes easier to finger a 10th than a 3rd, and a +13 or 11 is reachable. Actually, voicing across 2 octaves become a cinch; just don’t try and play a walking or funk bassline without changing hand positions because you can’t….instead it’s crying out for arpeggios, chords and polyphonic left hand rhythms. Lucky I’m primarily a keyboard player.
I don’t know whether Tony uses ascending 5ths or not; maybe thats why he plays 2 handed bass on the stick, but i suspect he tunes the bass strings in ascending 4ths when playing bass lines.
In any case, its great fun, sounds fantastic, tunes easily, and is very dynamic. I just wish i had more time….and yes I will post a video.
And in unrelated news, the hard drive on my laptop failed. I am determined that that will be the last spinning turntable of magnetic bits I purchase.
