It's been said that the Stick can play just about anything. "The only limit is your imagination..." But the imagination must be exercised, and a musician requires certain skills to translate complex musical thoughts onto the fretboard.

The greatest innovation of two-region tapping, to me, is the fact that every available musical teaching resource can be used directly with a stringed instrument. Books on harmony--historical, modern, jazz--require study at the piano, but now a string player can sit down with one of these and play the examples as written using his/her preferred instrumental technique. The mind is the most important instrument a (good) musician has, and the Stick is an excellent tool to develop it.

There are two-handed etudes to develop specific musical skills, such as hand independence. Bartok's set of etudes Mikrokosmos is as effective a tool as you will find to help develop this skill; you also learn the fretboard and music notation simultaneously, and with a minimum of frustration. Starting with the simplest possible material for two hands (scales in unison an octave apart), these little pieces very gradually introduce differences into what the hands are doing together, until they are doing quite different things. The music becomes more interesting too, and is not at all childish.

Unfortunately, the playing of unison passages is not so easy in classic tuning as it is in fourths (very easy), which is probably why this excellent system is not very well known to Stickists.

Grand staff-based musical skills and knowledge, when developed on the Stick fretboard, translate fairly directly to other fretboard instruments. Maybe eventually the instrument will be used as a study tool by guitarists who want to develop their musical skills to the maximum without having to take the otherwise necessary detour through piano technique.


Mad Monk.

Great post. I had never heard of the Mikrokosmos. After looking through the first book it is organized into small sections which are great to practice and gradually becomes more difficult.

Excellent resource!

Interesting topic Mad Monk. For those interested, (the whole site is an infinite resource of material for those looking for sources of ideas that can be imported from the piano), check this thread specifically:

http://www.pianostreet.com/smf/index.php?topic=34501.0

and the rest of the site for other material that may be available.

On the parallel universe of rhythmic patters (essential part of hand independence), the most amazing books I've seen are Dandelot's "Etude du rythme" vol 1, 2 and 3, where he develops simple rhythmic parts that easy you in some diabolic two-hand combinations that could be very helpful in your research.

Regards,

Gustavo

Thanks, Gustavo, for the Bartok .pdf link.
As for Dandelot, I will make a point of tracking down a copy.

Mad Monk.

Interesting. A few months ago I tried "le petite carnaval", by Streabbog, and a few easy piano pieces, like the ones in the suzuki method. But maybe my favorite way to study is take some fakebook, and experiment with melody, chords and rhythm. In this page there are thousands of classical transcriptions, of public domain. http://imslp.org/wiki/

Thanks for the link, that's an impressive collection of scores.

Recently I was playing around with Frank Mantooth's Voicings for Jazz Keyboard; it has various devices for playing common chords in cool substitute forms, like stacked fourths...mostly 5-voice "locked hands" voicings. Worth a look.

Mad Monk.

This one is very interesting, too: Smooth Jazz Piano, The Companion Guide, By Mark Harrison. Good for voicings in a smooth jazz context.