Chapman Stick
The Chapman Stick is an electric musical instrument devised by Emmett Chapman in the early 1970s. A member of the guitar family, the Chapman Stick usually has ten or twelve individually tuned strings and is used to play bass lines, melody lines, chords, or textures. Designed as a fully polyphonic chordal instrument, it can also cover several of these musical parts simultaneously.[1]
The Stick is available with passive or active pickup modules that are plugged into a separate instrument amplifier. With a special synthesizer pickup, it can be used to trigger synthesizers and send MIDI messages to electronic instruments.
The Stick (10 strings, 5 melody & 5 bass/6 melody & 4 bass, other custom tunings and set-ups, 36" scale length)
The Railboard (10 strings, a 1-piece CNC-cut thru-neck aluminum beam with 9 pieces bolted-on including headstock, bridge, new R-Block pickup module, 34" scale)
Grand Stick (12 strings, 6 melody & 6 bass/7 melody & 5 bass, other custom tunings and set-ups, 36" scale length)
10-String Grand Stick (10 strings installed on a wooden or laminated bamboo "blanks" for the Grand Stick 12-string model, thus creating a wider fretboard & string spacing for a 10-string Stick. Center-to-center string spacing is 0.350" as opposed to 0.315" on standard 10-string Sticks. The space between the "melody" & "bass" groups of strings is also wider, at 0.500" instead of the standard 0.430". Same 5 melody & 5 bass/6 melody & 4 bass, custom tunings and set-ups & 36" scale length as the standard 10-string Stick)
Stick Bass (SB8) (8 strings, undivided "straight 4ths" B-Bb or B-A electric guitar intervals tuning, standard Stick 4 melody & 4 bass, other custom tunings and set-ups, 36" scale length)
bass guitar
(8 strings set up for plucking, strumming, or tapping in standard bass or guitar intervals, standard Stick 5 melody & 5 bass, other custom tunings and set-ups; co-invented by Chapman & Ned Steinberger, 34" scale length)
NS/Stick
Alto Stick (10 strings, 5 melody + 5 accompaniment, with shorter scale length for a more -like range, 26.5" scale length)
guitar
Stick Guitar (12 strings, 2 groups of 6, with shorter scale length for a more -like range, 26.5" scale length)
guitar
Carlos Alonso, leader of
Glueleg
(Kajagoogoo, Ellis, Beggs & Howard, John Paul Jones, Nik Kershaw, Howard Jones, Iona, Steve Hackett, Steven Wilson, Lifesigns)[14]
Nick Beggs
Blue Man Group
Brian Bourne
author and musician
Terry Burrows
inventor of the Chapman Stick Touchboard and the Free Hands Two-Handed Tapping Technique
Emmett Chapman
solo Stick performer
Guillermo Cides
solo Stick performer
Bob Culbertson
plays Chapman Stick on the tracks 'Sleep' and 'Who Can Stand in the Way' on the Midnight Oil album Red Sails in the Sunset and in concert
Peter Gifford
played Chapman Stick with Robert Fripp, David Sylvian, Sunday All Over the World, King Crimson and UKZ
Trey Gunn
solo and with Peter Gabriel, King Crimson, Yes, Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe (notably on live renditions of "Close to the Edge"), Pink Floyd, Stick Men, and Liquid Tension Experiment
Tony Levin
Mark McCullough with
Red Wanting Blue
plays Chapman Stick on his album The Songs of Distant Earth (and in some multimedia video clips on the extended CD) (although Oldfield plays with pick as opposed to two-hand technique)
Mike Oldfield
solo Stick player from Ankara, Turkey
Akın Ünver
Fariz RM
which are called "inverse tunings" in the Chapman Stick community