Dave: Music and learning, a case study of taking up a new instrument later in life
Fulfilling Ambitions
I’m in my seventies and a couple of years ago I decided to fulfil an ambition and learn to play the Chapman Stick™. The “Stick” is a stringed and fretted instrument that produces sound by tapping the strings on the fretboard – not by plucking or strumming. It was developed in the early 1970’s by Emmett Chapman, an innovative guitarist and guitar engineer from California. Although some acoustic versions were made, it has settled as a stereo electronic instrument, in 8-string, 10-string and 12-string versions. Each Stick is custom made to order by Emmett’s family-run workshop in California and takes several months to complete. See more on their website www.stick.com.
Chapman Stick on a modified bassoon stand. The coloured dots on the fretboard are temporary learning devices to locate key notes.
The Stick has some features that make it remarkably difficult to play and to learn. My 10-string version is 115cm long by 9cm wide and weighs 3.9kg. It is played in an upright position, the weight being taken by a belt hook, and a shoulder strap to stop it falling to the side. The Stick is worn rather than held. To put it mildly, the Stick is a very challenging instrument to take on, but can produce beautiful sounds in capable hands. I have a long way to go on that front. To see it in action either visit www.Stick.com or search YouTube for Greg Howard or Bob Culbertson to see how two leading players make the Stick sing. If you are interested in the technical side of the Stick, I’ve added a short description of its complexities at the end.
My musical background is pretty modest and does not equip me very well for a new instrument, especially one as complex as the Stick. I went to piano lessons for a couple of years between the ages of 11 and 13, but it was not a success. I bailed out at Grade V thanks to my piano teacher’s ninja speed and accuracy with a size 1 knitting needle to correct my fingering. That period was the summit of my playing and sight-reading, and although I continue to dabble at home, my keyboard skills will stay firmly in the closet. I have sung in choirs and folk groups, and am a self-taught guitarist, preferring to provide backing and accompaniment, now mostly in traditional music and ceilidh bands. My musical ‘level’ could be described as basic, intuitive and dabbling.
Over the years I’ve written and recorded many silly songs and musical adventures for my children and grandchildren, who have been my most forgiving audiences. At best I’d say I was unconsciously creative and consciously incompetent, but I enjoy playing at my level and listening to music across the whole spectrum of genres. Both of my children are musical – my daughter is a fine singer-songwriter and my son is a very good pianist and guitarist. Both of them are much better musicians than I am. My 3 grandchildren are learning piano, drums, guitar, violin and ukulele. Whatever I may do, or have done in music, their love of, and participation in it will be my greatest satisfaction.
Starting to learn the Stick at my age has prompted me to reflect on how I learn in music. Looking back, my only formal music learning was the unhappy piano lessons mentioned above. I attended a couple of guitar workshops at the Sage in recent years, neither of which resulted in much learning. I experienced something approaching formal learning in music through the rehearsal and performing elements of various choirs and musical theatre groups, for example a period with a Gilbert and Sullivan Society, a couple of village pantomimes, and school productions including Joseph and Godspell. As a self-taught guitarist I have intermittently dipped into books, DVDs and online videos, but I think my approach to learning is primarily through play and experimentation. I can be systematic and organised in some aspects of my life, but when it comes to learning something entirely new, disciplined sequential learning is not my way.
What I have learned through playing the guitar is a cumulative grasp of the structure of music and harmony, thanks to the way guitar chords are built and named. I recently watched Leonard Bernstein’s 5 minute video on the history of tonal music and was smugly pleased with myself for having reached an understanding of most of what he says through my haphazard journey of learning in music. www.classicfm.com/composers/bernstein-l/guides/whole-history-of-music/
The way I learn in music is pretty much the way I learn, or prefer to learn, anything else. I like to rummage around the topic, getting inspired and stimulated, listening, reading, experimenting, always looking for shortcuts, and trying to get a pleasing result without the hard work of 10,000 hours of practice. I know many musicians who have reached a high level of competence through formal teaching and dedicated practice. My very old friend and original climbing partner, the composer Euan Moseley (www.doppiotempo.com) is a fantastic technical and creative pianist who once told me that in his early years of piano lessons he had to play nothing but scales for 2 hours a day.
To reach any kind of competence on the Stick I’m sure I would be advised to get professional lessons, do lots and lots of regular basic practice of a similar nature to Euan’s early days, and to practise repeatedly some incrementally difficult pieces, yet my preferred and habit-formed learning style will not make that possible for me. Added to that, there are only a tiny number of Stick players in the UK, mostly in the London area, and no accessible teachers. So I have to examine my motivation, my goals and expectations and find an approach to learning that will satisfy those. At the moment, I’m happy to make pleasing sounds on the instrument for my own consumption and gradually become more at one with the Stick.
I have no ambition at present to perform in public, even though I know that is a great stimulus to improve. Longer term, (to be optimistic) I’d like to be able to offer competent and original accompaniment to another musician – singer or instrumentalist. Playing well with other musicians is when I am most likely to experience a state of flow – either because we get the piece absolutely nailed (as young people and TV chefs will say) or, and this is an important dimension for me, when confidence and familiarity allows improvisations that just simply work and make you smile inside.
Getting older and learning music has presented a few challenges for me. First of all, it was progressive arthritis in the fingers, exacerbated no doubt by over 50 years of rock-climbing, that led me to take up learning the Stick. I assumed that merely tapping the strings would be physically easier than holding down notes and chords on the guitar – I was finding it painful after an hour or two of playing. To some extent that assumption has proved right, but the new and unfamiliar hand positions create entirely new stresses. The playing position also places new strains on the back and particularly the neck, but this is more about inhibiting playing technique than learning. I find that my short-term memory is less reliable, so I need to repeat new phrases and pieces more often to embed them than in younger days. Eyesight is another problem, as I have to look down the fretboard from close up to locate frets which are increasingly close together as they get further away. These impediments are forcing me to rely much more on muscle memory and spatial familiarity than visual pattern learning, which is not necessarily a bad thing. On the plus side, the older I get the less embarrassed I am about mistakes, and I’m comfortable with my modest ambitions.
The Coronavirus lockdown has given me more time to learn and improve my Stick playing, and I have also been motivated to explore alternative guitar tunings. An interest in continuing to learn in music has proved a valuable antidote to cabin fever. Maybe I will eventually progress from Stuck on the Stick to Slick on the Stick!
Some technical aspects of the Stick.
The musical challenges begin with the way the strings are configured. There are 5 bass strings on one side (nearest the player) and 5 melody strings on the side away from the player. The lowest notes for both bass and melody begin at the centre of the fretboard. In the tuning I use (Raised Matched Reciprocal), the bass strings are tuned in 5ths starting with the lowest note D in the centre rising towards the player, and the melody strings are tuned in 4ths starting with the lowest note F# in the centre rising away from the player. The confusing result is that you can play Middle C in 6 different places across the 24 frets! The tonal range is 6 octaves (a standard guitar has 4). To make progress on the Stick you have to unlearn most of what your fingers are used to doing on the guitar. The dynamic range is satisfyingly wide – soft to loud depends on how hard you tap, strings can be bent, damped, hammered on or off, vibrato and slides are easy to produce, harmonics are possible but difficult, and the range of chords and their inversions is limited only by the stretch, number and size of your fingers.
Most players play the bass side with their left hand coming round the back of the neck and play the melody side by reaching the right hand across the stick to play melody strings. There is no established canon for the Stick – its repertoire is defined entirely by the people who play, and ranges from Bach to the Beatles, Rock to New Age, Celtic to Jazz. As it is an electronic instrument it can plug in to an array of effects pedals. The sophisticated pickup module gives another sweep of sound options, but I am not techie enough to describe that, and anyway I’m still struggling with the basics. The kinaesthetic challenge is considerable. In the playing position, it is hard to see the frets. Imagine learning to play the piano by laying your head down on the keys at the bottom end and finding the scales and arpeggios from that position. Yet a keyboard background is probably a better starting point than a guitar – left and right-hand independence is an important goal.
There is a limited amount of published written music for the Stick. It combines standard notation using a bass and treble clef, but incorporates a tablature with chords, a marker for which string plays the note, which fret it is played at, and through 4 symbols, which finger plays the note. It’s basically mind-blowing and useful only as an early learning tool. I doubt if any Stick players are fluent readers of the tablature, although some do share their compositions and arrangements in notation.
Dave Hume
April 2020