I'm curious about something. I've played for a little while, but when I see others play, it often seems as if you guys are really hitting the strings quite lightly. I mostly do so as well, but I often find myself lacking volume on the two thinnest melody strings, which leads me to the question of how hard you guys are hitting the strings. Thanks for any tips/insights

Let your amp do most of the work. You don't need to hit the strings very hard unless you want to play something dramatic in your tune.

I use a Line 6 - Helix Floor as my pre-amp and route it directly into the main amp of a Roland JC-120 bypassing all of the pre-amp knobs on the front of the cabinet. Some people say that the JC-120 amp has a hiss or floor noise, but this is coming from the pre-amps. When you bypass the cab pre-amps, the JC-120 is extremely quiet and you won't even know that it is on, until you strike a string. The nice thing about the Helix is that you can change the volume on each of your virtual pedals. It has excellent gain capabilities with very low floor noise. I hope that this answers your question.

If you have a passive pickup - then a pre-amp with high impedance match will help ( like 1MOhm or higher) especially on those high strings. Some multi effects boxes can be set this way. And many acoustic instrument oriented amps ( like fishman ) will have features for this. In any case, a good pre amping solution will make it much easier to get the amp do the work for you.


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Hi,
Emmett wrote this to me about the "light touch":

"Tapping the strings lightly upon the frets is less work, not additional work, except of course that if you’ve always generally pressed hard on stringed instruments, then you must relearn your motor reflexes to play with a light touch.

The advantages of light touch include:

- Finger dynamics, You can tap selected notes with more force or just lay the string onto the fret for the quietest note.
- Tone and intonation (true octaves).
- Expressive fingering effects.
- Fluency and speed.
- Endurance, also with no calluses and less fingertip sweat.



Andi

The outer strings don't have the same volume as the inner strings. This is true. You can adjust your touch accordingly or use some compression. If you review past threads, you can find this topic comes up from time to time. Over-compression does eliminate dynamic range, so it is a balancing act.

The stick is not unlike any other string instrument. There are times when you want to hit the strings hard (I do this for chords). I have to disagree with some others here. Letting the amp do this means you won't have any nuance. For single notes, there doesn't seem to be much of a reason to hit them hard. Think of it like a guitar. You can play a chord with a light strum or hit it hard. The sounds is completely different.

Perhaps a better maxim is let the amp do *most* of the work for you. If you are bashing the frets just to get a moderate level note then you need to possibly rethink your amplification setup as you’re probably not availing yourself of all the dynamics that you are talking about with your setup. Not talking about compression or anything here. just making sure you have a good impedance / preamp / headroom match so you can get a good range of dynamics.


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I like to hit them soft, I like to hit them hard. The Stick has an incredible dynamic range. If you use hand movement as a basic technique, the dynamics are much easier to control than with finger energy alone. (Hand movement is the key to so much on this instrument, from my perspective)...

Also, make sure you contact the note just behind the fret. This is the sweet spot.

I can't speak for anyone else here, but what I think what Mike and others mean when they say "let the amp do the work for you" is this. If the amp's volume isn't turned up to a decent enough level, an inexperienced player is going to tend to hit the strings harder than need be to produce a note. I was guilty of this in the past (hell, even now sometimes) and I know I'm not alone. Doing this regularly can cause all sorts of physical problems, and it can negatively effect fluidity and expression.

Developing nuance and dynamics requires one to be able to hear everything that one is playing, and that requires some work from the amp.

A couple of points here...

1. If you action is high or your pickup is not adjusted properly, this is definitely a possibility, but with hand movement as a basic technique, and the right praamping, the relative volume of the strings has never been an issue for me. Plugging into an impedance mismatch will make the thinner strings too quiet, and eqing in a lot of low end will have the same effecrt.

2. Compression can become a crutch. I prefer using limiters just to protect the effects input from overload if I get really aggressive, using compression for it's sonic qualities or to cut the attack of notes (good before distortion).

Speaking of distortion... the lighter your touch, the more gain is required to get the same sound, which leads to risks of crosstalk interfering with your melody sound.

Also, the strings are not keys on a Casio, the sound actually changes when you put more energy into the string, More force, in the sweet spot=more fundanetal frequency=better tone to my ear.