Very nice playing, Mike! I like all the other pieces on that page as well. The vibe also reminds me of piano player Paul Bley. And Tony Scott and Jimmy Giuffrey... Great to hear a Stick player doing his own originals in this style.

maxr wrote:

Andy - the bottom end of your Stick looks like it might be too low for a belt hook in your video. Are you using a cello spike or a stand, and if so, do you use a shoulder strap with that?

Max

No Max, the belt hook is just resting on the chair. With the shoulder strap on, I find this reasonably secure and comfortable. You can also wear a very loose belt for extra support when you sit down.

Cheers,
Andy

@Mike Hoegeman
I listened to your playing on "Timeless", while having my morning coffee today and it was a "golden moment". I'm borrowing Rahsaan Roland Kirk's golden moment, but it works so well in this instance. Thanks for the hours spent learning to play like that and for posting it.

Take the plunge. Get the Stick. You will be catapulted into the 4th Dimension and be amazed/frustrated at what you can/cannot do (right now) on the instrument. Still finding my voice and i seem to speak in many tongues...

Hi Jay,

Much of that track is actually plucked (something people don't seem to realize they can do on The Stick). The really fast runs are two-handed tapping together on the bass strings. The instrument I used on that was a standard rosewood 10-string with a Stickup and light gauge strings.

Part of the sound you're talking about it just the sound of a string hitting a fret. Emmett designed his pickups to reproduce everything that's coming off the string, so you can remove or enhance the elements you like best.

Some people really like the full-range sound, whereas others want a more guitar like or bass-like sound. Using appropriate amps, speaker simulators or filters is the best way to get that. That sting on fret attack sounds is largely in the high frequencies, which are not reproduced well by conventional open-back guitar amps and bass amps, so they can be filtered out that way, or through other means.

The PASV-4 has some very musical filtering built in. But this brings me to your post about the Big Bang 4965 Video:



That filter is the TC Fireworx, controlled with a foot controller. It's probably the easiest filter to manipulate out there via MIDI and it sounds great.

Filtering (and to a certain degree distortion) will trim the intense attack that is the more acoustic component of The Stick's natural sound.

All of the pickups Emmett uses are "full-range" pickups, and work well to external filters. The ACTV-2 has active treble roll-offs on each output, and the PASV-4 has "interactive" filtering, where the energy from the string is fed back into pickup somehow, (don't ask me how it works) kind of like a resonant filter on a synth, but more subtle. There's nothing like this filter design of Villex's anywhere else that I've seen on any other instrument.

@swartzfeger,

After posting it , i later thought on reflection, that i'd get either
baffled silence, or comments along the lines of "whaaat ? ". as a response

Glad it made some semblence of sense.

-mike

@per and others.

Thanks for the thumbs up re: the myspace song-lets. My Stick motivation has been
anemic in recent months due to crunches at work, etc.. Everyone likes a little postive motivation
now and then. Maybe i'll go play a bit now..

Thanks