Chapman Stick

The Chapman Stick is an electric musical instrument devised by Emmett Chapman in the early 1970s. He set out to create an instrument designed for the tapping technique of both hands parallel to the frets that he invented in 1969. The first production model of the Stick was shipped in 1974.

Superficially, it looks like a wide version of the fretboard of an electric guitar with 8, 10 or 12 strings mounted on it, but it is considerably longer and wider than a guitar fretboard. Unlike the electric guitar, it is usually played by tapping or fretting the strings, rather than plucking them. Instead of one hand fretting and the other hand plucking, both hands sound notes by striking the strings against the fingerboard just behind the appropriate frets for the desired notes. For this reason, it can sound many more notes at once than most other stringed instruments, making it more comparable to a keyboard instrument than to other stringed instruments. This arrangement lends itself to playing multiple lines at once and many Stick players have mastered performing bass, chords and melody lines simultaneously.

Over the years, Chapman Sticks have been made out of many materials. The first ones were made from super hardwoods, most from ironwood, but some from ebony and other exotic woods, through the early 1980s. The next group, chronologically, were made from an injection-molded polycarbonate resin through the early 1990s. Today, they are made from many hardwoods (including padauk, Indian rosewood, tarara, maple and mahogany),other organic materials like bamboo, as well as graphite epoxy and other even more high-tech composites.