Carl Orff recommended retuning guitars for young people who have never played before and whose fingers might still be too small or uncoordinated to be expected to play guitar the normal way. He retuned the guitar so that placing one finger across at least four strings produced a normal major guitar chord. Then they could participate to play blues with the rest of the children. Retuning the stick to create a major guitar chord with one finger would be very useful in an educational setting. Just a thought.

Would it not be better to use a minor chord? Then one could play maj or min with only one or two fingers. The index finger would be used as a bar/capo and the middle finger could be used to raise the 3rd (2nd string) a 1/2 step to make a major chord

I think lonesome George Thorogood made a whole career of playing like that.

I think if you play use one finger of each hand to tap strings 1,2,3,8,9 and 10 in classic tuning all at the same fret you get a nice jazzy sounding chord.

Minor chords can also be used of course.

The chord produced by one finger on a stick's classic tuning is quartal harmony. On keyboard it normally includes three notes in the right hand and two of them in the left for a total of only 5 pitches. So on a melody side with six strings you might want to leave the lowest note out. In straight up jazz you normally only use it for the ii chord and the V chord. (The quartal V chord needs to be altered. It's not just one finger.) When going to the I chord, you usually play a normal voicing not a quartal. However, in modal jazz you can exclusively use the quartal chord for major, minor and dominant because the harmony doesn't change frequently and the lack of ii V I progressions.

I guess what I was thinking was thinking was something like tuning the bass side to a B F# B D F# B. Using the index finger to bar/tapp all would create a full minor chord. By adding the middle finger up a fret on the 3rd string you could create a major chord. To me this seems like a very easy way play all of the traditional chord progressions (I, ii, IV, V). Frankly the 5th tuning kinda solves the easy finger method anyhow. however it is only feasible to play 3/4 note chords. I guess in my above method you could create 6 note chords but the voicing would be very odd to say the least. Emitt worked it out right IMHO

The problem with this idea is that there's no articulating hand to attack the strings in any diverse musical way. We don't really want all the notes to be tapped by one finger, that just limits how the chord can be played to "all notes at once."

Since each hand taps on its own, the best way to tune is the way that makes tapping chords in a variety of different ways possible, with the fingers able to work independently or together to play block chords, arpeggiated chords.

Inverted 5ths does this very well. A huge variety of major, minor, 7th, 9th, 6th, diminished, etc chords are all accessible in easy to form shapes on only 3 frets. For the most common chords and inversions it is a dream:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TZi0qKzKCM[/youtube]

The melody strings in uniform 4ths are also incredibly easy to see chords on, as stacks of major and minor 3rds.

It's better to show how intervals relate to the tuning than to alter the tuning to create an artificial and limited tapping environment. So, respectfully, if Orff knew about how the Stick actually works, and not just how the notes lay out on the strings, I doubt he would come up with this idea at all...

but yes, zaxas1, your suggestion of minor 3rds is definitely better than major 3rds. I've experimented with minor 3rds as a tuning. It's fun, but the overall pattern of notes is harder to see.

Orff would not be interested in having five year olds try and articulate arpeggios. He would be interested in only slapping one finger to make major chords which is what he suggested on guitar.

The OP's idea of using Sticks (as opposed to rhythm sticks, which are already used ) in elementary music education is initially intriguing. There are some quandaries, however.

I should insert the disclaimer that I am not a music teacher, but my wife taught elementary music for several years. Part of her curriculum included Orff methods.

The closest in-practice application of the OP's idea is the commonly-seen (and oft-maligned) autoharp, where a student presses a button with one hand to set the chord and strums the strings with the other hand.

The Orff idea relies on barring, which is still a bit more of a traditional guitar method. The one really useful thing about the stick is that the string tension is so low as for it to be plausible for a youngster to get it to effectively sound. My kids could generate some decent tones from my NS/Stick fairly effortlessly. Point, Stick.

I think one difficulty in teaching beginning/primary level music theory on a stringed instrument is there's almost two many options for voicing the same chord. Much of primary music pedagogy relies on the keyboard (and often only a single tetrachord or scale), which only has one occurrence of a given note. The ability of playing the same note on a different part of the fretboard, which is a blessing and provides flexibility for us, may very well be a liability when you're trying to distill music theory down to it's most basic elements for understanding.

Another difficulty with using a Stick in such a setting is cost. Even with the wonderfully more accessible railboards, for a class of 10 students you're talking $16,500, not including some kind of amplification for those instruments.

Now, barring these difficulties, there may still be some interesting possibilities with the idea--and I realize I'm not being particularly creative with how a Stick might be useful in other aspects of the pedagogy. Any elementary educators want to chime in?

and then of course you have Robert Fripp and the League of Crafty Guitarists to really muck up the Arena. i like 4ths/5ths. i couldn't play chords on a guitar. still cant. but i can play chords w my left hand on the Stick (crab) and w my right hand (bird). someday, probably long after Emmett (and some of us) have passed, they'll be making little plastic "sticks" - like recorders - and opening up little tykes to the gift of music...