The first thing that people ask me when I mention that I play Chapman Stick is "What on Earth's a Chapman Stick?" It's a fair question—it's not a musical instrument that you see very often on MTV.
So—this is a standard, ten-string Stick:
As you can see, it's a stringed instrument. But you play a Stick by tapping the strings on to the fretboard rather than by plucking or strumming them.
There are many different tuning schemes for the Stick but the one I use gives it a musical range which drops below the lowest note on a bass guitar and rises to the same register as the high notes on an electric guitar, so you've got quite a few notes to play with. Both the bass and the melody side strings are lowest in pitch in the middle of the fretboard and highest at the edges. For the so-called "classic" tuning that I use, strings 10 to 1 are tuned as follows.
E - A - D - G - C (lowest note) - F♯ - B - E - A - D (highest note)
Sticks come in many flavours. There's an aluminium version of it that's called the Railboard; there's an 8-string bass instrument called the SB8 Stick Bass, a shorter scale, 12-string instrument called the SB12 Stick Guitar, and for players who want to focus on the melody side rather than the bass, there's an Alto Stick. Emmett designed an 8-string bass guitar with Ned Steinberger called the NS Stick; and there's also a Grand Stick which looks pretty much the same as a classic Stick, except for the fact that you have twelve strings to play with instead of just ten.
Do I own one? No. Do I want one? Oh, absolutely.
As soon as I heard what a Stick sounded like, I knew I wanted one. As the Internet wasn't a thing back in the 1980s, we had to rely on snail mail if we wanted to find things out so I simply wrote a letter to Stick Enterprises in California asking for more information on the instrument. A few weeks later, I was delighted (and amazed) to receive a handwritten reply from Emmett himself.
I was too poor to afford one at the time.
But a work colleague of mine wasn't, and he did buy one. After struggling to master it for several years, he eventually gave up and sold it to me. And I've been playing it ever since.
Most Stick players play bass with the left hand and treble with the right much as you would do with a piano, but your hands cross over. This is why the lowest strings on the Stick are the ones in the middle of the fingerboard; the Stick's inventor, Emmett Chapman, spent years perfecting the design and he developed a tuning scheme that made the most sense to him.
As I'd been a keyboard player for decades before I first got my hands on a Stick, the idea of playing a separate melody or chord with each hand wasn't new to me. If you're a guitarist or bass player you might find it more of a challenge adjusting to this way of playing, as my colleague did (to my eventual benefit).
It's not so much a case of you picking up a Stick in order to play it—it's more a case of putting it on and wearing it.
You wear it by hooking a clip into your belt, and looping the strap over your head and under one armpit, as you can see here.
Although the Stick has a single output jack, the socket is wired for a Y cable so that the bass side of the strings and the treble side of the strings can be fed to different amplifiers. Plug in, fire up your amps, and off you go.
What does the Stick sound like? Well, the bass sound is very percussive, as you'd expect. Tony Levin used one a lot on Peter Gabriel's early albums, and I think that's probably where I first heard one. I Don't Remember from Peter Gabriel III is what I normally play to people who ask and say "that's what a Stick sounds like..." The first time I saw a Stick player playing live, and on TV, it would have been Tony, either with Peter Gabriel or with King Crimson. In 1983 when ITV's South Bank Show did a documentary on how Peter Gabriel recorded his fourth album, a strangely moustache-less Mr Levin was asked to explain a little bit about the instrument:
You can also hear Stick basslines on:
- One Slip on Pink Floyd's album A Momentary Lapse of Reason
- Eating The Bear on Joan Armatrading's album Walk Under Ladders
- Talk To Me on Lisa Dalbello's album She
- Tonto on Rosie Vela's album Zazu
- Elephant Talk on King Crimson's album Discipline
The melody strings can sound almost like a harpsicord at times, although with a set of effects pedals you can get it to sound like just about anything. But it's that deep, resonant, percussive bass that made me fall in love with the Stick and I'm amazed how popular it is (and how many people comment on the sound) when I use it during FAWM and Fifty/Ninety.
If you're as much of a movie nerd as I am, you've probably seen the David Lynch film "Dune" and remember that Patrick Stewart played Gurney Halleck. The first time we see Sir Patrick in the film here, he's carrying Gurney's baliset—and if you look closely, you might be able to make out that the prop in the film was a customised Stick.
Although it didn't make it into the film's final cut, a scene of Gurney playing the baliset was filmed with Sir Patrick miming to a recording of Emmett playing one of his own compositions, a piece called Back Yard:
And while we're talking about the 1980s, I used to get very excited when a Stick player made it into the pop charts and ended up on Top Of The Pops more than once (hi Nick!)
So, who's who in the world of the Stick?
This is the official website of Stick Enterprises, the folks who make the Stick. Emmett Chapman was very supportive of the instrument he invented and the people who play it right up until his death in 2021.
Understandably, Emmett was also an amazing Stick player. I have his "Hands Across the Board" VHS video which is well worth watching.
Nick and the Stick go way back.
Hey—I went and saw Kajagoogoo many years ago, and yes, I was at least ten years older than anyone else in the audience, but here was this chart-topping band who actually had a Stick player, and who were getting coverage on TV. Of course I was going to give them my support!
Since the days of the Kajas Nick has been working steadily, building up a huge reputation in the prog rock world as the go-to player for bass and vocals. In fact he's one of the hardest-working bass and Stick players in the business, having toured with Steven Wilson, Steve Hackett, Howard Jones, Kim Wilde, and many others.
He always has an extensive number of his own projects on the go, from Trifecta (with Adam Holzman and Craig Blundell), The Mute Gods (with Marco Minnemann and Roger King), and Fish On Friday (with Frank Van Bogaert, Marty Townsend, and Marcus Weymaere), to the band he runs with his daughters, The Beggs Sisters.
Back in the dim and distant past when I lived in Milton Keynes, I used to enjoy watching a TV channel called Sky Channel (this was back in the days when Rupert Murdoch was just dipping his toes in the waters of UK media rather than pissing in them) which used to rebroadcast a lot of American chat shows such as the David Letterman Show and the Tonight Show. One evening in 1994, deep in the throes of a divorce and feeling very alone and miserable, I tuned in to witness an extraordinary sight: three silent, bald men dressed in black, industrial-grade boiler suits were creating complete havoc on Jay Leno's The Tonight Show.
Their alien appearance was strongly enhanced by the fact that their skin was a vivid shade of blue and they did not appear to have ears. In the next few minutes, they covered the entire studio in reams of dot matrix printer paper, rendered Jay and his guests utterly speechless, and then unexpectedly launched into a cover version of The KLF's classic dance track Last Train to Transcentral while climbing up the stage set as well as wading into the audience (who were buried under a sea of paper streamers by this point) and going completely wild. I'd never seen anything even remotely like it on television before and when it finished I sat there asking myself what I'd just seen. But the thing that made the most vivid impression on me at the time was the fact that their band had not one, but TWO Chapman Stick players. Wait, what? I completely lost my mind.
I recently found a recording of that event in its entirety on YouTube. It brought back a lot of memories.
Multiple iterations of the group (which is run as a franchise) play shows across the United States and occasionally venture further afield. Since that evening in 1994 I've acquired several DVDs and Blu-Rays of their live performances and a couple of audio CDs. In 2024 I finally fulfilled my ambition of seeing a BMG show live, although sadly no Stick players were in evidence. I'm still a big fan. There isn't another stage show like them on this planet. For a taste of what they're like, see if you can track down a copy of the Complex Rock Tour Live DVD. It's well worth getting hold of.
Apart from his work with the highly esteemed Mr Fripp on projects from The Bridge Between to Damage (which also features David Sylvian and Michael Brook) and several of the many incarnations of King Crimson, Trey has worked with artists as diverse as Michael Manring, Jerry Marotta, TOOL, Pat Mastelotto, and Finnish accordionist Kimmo Pohjonen. He composes music for film and TV, and has also issued a number of excellent solo albums over the years: One Thousand Years and The Third Star are old favourites of mine but he also has an extensive discography on Bandcamp and runs his own record label, 7D Media.
Trey is also the person responsible for me taking up the Warr Guitar as a touchstyle instrument; I play a Trey Gunn Signature Series TGSS-8, but that's a tale for a different web page...
If you saw the late lamented John Martyn on one of his last excursions, or perhaps saw him playing live on VH-1, you probably noticed that he had a Stick player in his band. That was Jim. The first album of his that I bought was TV Weather and that immediately identified him as a master of the instrument.
Sadly Jim passed away in March 2025. The Stick community has lost one of its best with his passing.
Tony was the man who started me off on Stick, after I saw him playing for King Crimson and Peter Gabriel. Tony has a prolific recording career ranging from his own solo albums to projects with Bruford Levin Upper Extremities, as well as session work for everyone from Pink Floyd to John Lennon, from Joan Armatrading to the California Guitar Trio, from The Roches to Rosie Vela. He's also a really nice chap; I've met him several times.
A real Internet enthusiast, Tony keeps his site frequently updated and it's well worth a visit. He takes photos of the audience at nearly every gig he plays, and sometimes I've spotted myself in them - the best being on the Stick Men tour back in June 2012. It was Tony's birthday that day, too—just scroll down past the cake... Quite a few of the what to do with my badly-printed CD booklets suggestions on his site are from me.
When I found out that there was going to be an Atmos mix of Tony's latest album Bringing It Down To The Bass I ordered it on the spot. It's incredible; you will never hear a better collection of the best bass playing (and tones!) ever recorded. He's no slouch as a singer, too.
And you should definitely get a copy of Tony's book, Beyond the Bass Clef: The Life and Art of Bass Playing which is available from his website. It's a fascinating read.
You might have seen Carrie playing bass and Stick for Mike Oldfield on Later with Jools Holland. She's also toured with Bristol's finest, Tricky. Carrie was also the bass player in Babylon Zoo; remember "Spaceman"?
Ben is another U.K. Stick player who contacted me after seeing me reply to a message about the Stick in rec.music.makers.bass (which amply illustrates how long ago that was). If there's something going on about Stick on the Internet, Ben will know about it. Ben's also seriously into web stuff, as a visit to his site will show you - Ben is a guy who runs a serious blog and he puts my feeble attempts to shame...