While I wait for my turn in line for my own Stick I decided to use some old guitar parts I had lying around to make a dedicated training device for getting my head around a tapping instrument in a matched reciprocal tuning. I kept playing with this idea on my regular electric guitars but the intonation and string gauges just needed too significant an adjustment to be a minor change and the ergonomics were just not right for any serious study anyway. So after a bit of thought I just decided it was best to put a little more time into the idea and make a dedicated “trainer” since I had the parts and basically knew what to do to put it together. I’m not imagining this is the most ground-breaking idea ever but I haven’t seen anything exactly like it so I thought I’d throw it out there for people to see….plus, it was a lot of fun to dream up and build

Basically, I took the idea of using a regular 6 string neck and tuning it to the middle 6 strings of Bob’s Expanded Alto using what amounted to almost a fairly typical set of guitar strings….the low A string was from a super low tuned set (0.60 “) but outside of that they are all pretty typical gauge strings.
http://www.stick.com/instruments/tuning ... sexpanded/

I had all the parts I needed from other projects as I had a phase I went through where I tried to build guitars. I had this huge FAT strat neck too that I thought would be perfect for this as it’s thick all the way up and down with big tall frets (from a Stevie Ray Vaughn obsessive experiment …. LOL.) I even had a collection of some odd wood blanks (Catalpa in this case) so I had some fun over my holiday break making and designing a simple little body…without going too overboard. I had my local tech do the wiring (my least favorite part and what lead to the end of my “let’s build guitars” phase) and final set-up and got a belt clip from SE…why re-invent the wheel I figured.

So now I finally got it all together and I can start seeing what I can learn with it…which is pretty exciting. My goals here are to be able to get through the beginnings of the Greg Howard and Steve Adelson books with something in my hands. I don’t see why I shouldn’t be able to get some of the 4th’s and 5th’s concepts under my hands, chord shapes and basic rhythmic patterns as well as explore the totally new ideas of playing both rhythm and melody at the same time with both hands. I figure this tool should get me down the road a bit so that when my turn comes to have my real Stick it won’t feel quite so foreign and I can hopefully hit the ground running with it.

http://s733.photobucket.com/albums/ww33 ... g&newest=1

http://s733.photobucket.com/albums/ww33 ... g&newest=1

http://s733.photobucket.com/albums/ww33 ... g&newest=1