Imagine an electric guitar; now, lose the body; widen the neck to accommodate a set of bass strings, and stretch the whole thing out to 5 1/2 octaves. What you have is The Stick, the brainchild of jazz musician and inventor Emmett Chapman. You play the Stick by tapping the strings against the instrument’s neck, piano-style, to produce an amazing variety of tones and sound textures. A great advantage of the Stick’s two-handed playing technique is that it gives you complete freedom to play both the melody and bass parts simultaneously. Chapman’s most recent innovations are 2 MIDI-compatible versions of the Stick, a 5 MIDI string model, and a full 10 MIDI string version. Older models can be retrofitted by Stick Enterprises with MIDI pick-ups.
