Hi all. I haven't played Stick much for the last few years and lost track of where the main forum is for Stickists. Is this it now? I have no idea if anyone has been looking at my Stick pages, but a couple of days ago I noticed that the MIDI player was broken so I fixed it, at least for Internet Explorer. Here are the pages if you haven't looked at them before:

http://www.marksmart.net/instruments/st ... kmain.html

I will have to look at the archives to see what everyone has been up to. I've been working on keyboard and Haken Continuum for the last couple of years, playing in a classic rock cover band. So not much time for Stick. A while back I did build a new version of my custom pickup using Kent Armstrong Slimbuckers. I'll try to get a pic posted of that at some point.

I hope to get back into Stick later when the band is not keeping me so busy.

Mark Smart

Coincidence. Someone just asked me about the Wes Montgomery shirt I was wearing and announced your name in thanks. Good to see your return
SA

Nice that you're back, Mark - I'll be looking for your posts.

Sean Stirling

Thanks! Since I did some editing of the PHP code, it would be cool if people could try the pages out. They are supposed to adjust the TAB to match the model and tuning of Stick that you are using, and allow you to display the TAB for different keys. If you are bored, you could try these:

http://www.marksmart.net/instruments/st ... 2hand.html

Sean, aren't you the guy that used to work at New England Digital? I was wondering a while back if there was a good Synclavier-emulating soft synth available.

This is a very impressive tool Mark - I applaud your efforts.

I have been able to successfully access the pages, but when selecting Grand Stick in Classic melody I am not able to hear the Bock to Bock midi.

Let me know if you need any assistance with this effort as having a tool like this for the community would a tremendous asset. Can you imagine being able to feed in chords and melodies into this and have it arrange it in the format you have defined on your site? Amazing.

Amazing work Mark - bravo!

Thanks! Yeah several years ago I spent a lot of time on it. I'd like people to get some use out of it. So do the other MIDIs work for you but Bock to Bock doesn't? I haven't been able to get the MIDIs to work at all with Chrome, I dunno why. For me all the MIDIs will play in Internet Explorer and none will play in Chrome. In Firefox, the MIDIs will play, but the pages won't return to the same location on the page (go to the "id" tag property) when they reload to play the MIDIs. Internet Explorer seems to be the way to go.

So far what the scripts know how to do is arrange it so the ENTIRE melody part is above the ENTIRE bass part. If that's not possible it gives up. Having the scripts figure out how to do position changes in the middle of the tune would be a lot more complicated. But you can do quite a bit with it the way it is. The Bock to Bock arrangement has a lot of position changes, so the scripts can't handle switching that to different tunings. I didn't even attempt to make that one switchable. But the MIDI should still play for you.

The whole thing is written in PHP. Maybe at some point I could make the code available to PHP aces on the list.

The original arrangements are in text for like this one:

http://www.marksmart.net/instruments/st ... mShell.txt

The scripts take that, parse it, and then figure out how to convert it to other tunings. If someone sends me a text file like that one (be very careful about the vertical placement of the characters), the scripts might be able to convert it.

Many hours of work several years back. I got pretty good at designing classes in PHP. At the moment it's not connected to a database. It doesn't have to be to do this stuff.

I used ASCII characters to make it accessible in case there are any visually impaired users. This is even readable when you look at it with Lynx! One time I had a blind person write to me and thank me for using an ASCII diagram on my site because he could at least go through the picture using voice conversion software and hear it saying "minus minus minus plus pipe minus E" or whatever and get an idea of what the picture looked like!

Mark Smart

Hi Mark.

Yes it is good to have you back..!

I'm sure many of us will remember your pages from first searching through all the available Stick sites. At least that's how it was for me, stumbling on your picture of Wynton and Emmett.

Classic.

Post vids....!

Well, I don't have any Stick vids to post at the moment, but I have this one up of Continuum:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TdGJMpEOjQ

I've been woodshedding on it a lot for the classic rock band as well as figuring out some Bach.

Mark

Hi Mark - Just starting my day. I'll check out your pages soon. About a software version - I haven't really looked for anything out there - perhaps there is. Most of my music time these days involves my Rosewood Grand and my piano - but I've managed to tweak my little MacBook Pro into a fair Stirling Digital Music System whenever I want to move a few musical electrons.

Hey Mark, I have not had a chance to follow up with you on testing these tunes in different browsers. I DO think that our community needs a medium by which a tune can be documented and then transposed based on the user's tuning. Your work is very valuable to the group for sure.

Having presets would be great (MR, Baritone Melody, Classic, etc.), but being able to select the lowest tapped note would be ideal. This way, printed musical data could be made available regardless of tuning.

I would personally be ready to invest time, effort and money into such a venture. It could be that others in the community feel the same. I really want to keep this thread alive as having such a tool would offer Stickists, regardless of skill level, a valuable tool for learning.