Thanks for the feedback guys.

Everybody has their favorite way of doing things. My job as a teacher is not to tell people they are doing things wrong, but to explain my approach as clearly as I can and explore it's implications for making music on this instrument — what it leads to.

I like to improvise, so I try to find ways to play that are fluid and instinctive, and don't require too many choices on the fly.

So when I watch someone like Wes Montgomery soloing, and I see him leaving out the pinky pretty much all the time, it makes me feel like I'm not crazy to do the same. There's something physical at work here, but it's different for every person.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOm17yw__6U[/youtube]

But The Stick works differently, so I have to be careful not to draw too many conclusions from what I'm seeing, as in every comparison with guitar and bass. What's important, from my perspective as a teacher, is to have a clear understanding of how three fingers works, and to keep trying new things, like this single string soloing technique, that expand and validate the concept.

I'm really glad, Randy, that you gave it a chance. I know it's been a great thing for you.

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Thanks, Scott, and you're welcome.

The Railboard is an amazing-sounding instrument, very balanced across the whole string set, but that's not the whole story; technique has so much to do with tone. As far as the instrument goes, I especially like the tone using the "active mode". For this video, I plugged into my old TL audio compressor/preamp and then into my interface.

Funny you should mention the elbows...as my arms are completely involved in getting that tone, so my elbows are very busy

Playing the Stick is about so much more than where your fingertips end up!

Beyond gratuitous thread-page re-embedding:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HncJQ5-D4Sk[/youtube]

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Sometimes the movement is less obvious than others, but if you watch my arms closely, you can always see the gesture along the "line of attack". This concept is clearly laid out in my DVD, in case you don't have it:

http://www.greghoward.com/free_hands/dvd/

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Almost the entirety of violin and sitar technique is playing only on one string. It's an absolute must for dedicated string players to have down. Not surprised you've looked into it and probably that a long time ago.

I've been playing this way for a long time, but it took me a while to figure out how to teach it. My use of it has definitely gotten more fluid since coming up with this explanation...

one string a la mode...