The lovely sound of Nylon Strings is now available for Touch-Stylists!

With the advent of piezo pickups on Warr Guitars, a whole new world of string opportunities has opened up for players of Touchstyle instruments.

Not only do the piezo pickups work great as triggers for guitar synthesizers, but they …

produce a very acoustic sound from the focal point of the string on the bridge saddle. Most electric guitar pickups use copper wire wound around magnets to create an electrical voltage when the string vibrates, but piezos are different. They don’t need to have a metal string to induce a voltage in the pickup coil, and instead sense the vibration at the string fulcrum, requiring a separate pickup on each bridge saddle. The output of each pickup is later summed, so that it can be amplified and transmitted out of a typical 1/4 inch cable. This means any kind of string can be amplified, and there are quite a few choices available.

With acoustic six-string basses becoming popular and available, a few string companies have started making sets with nylon cores wrapped in brass or other materials.

One of the nice things about the uncrossed 4ths tuning that I started playing in late 1998 is that the bass tuning is just like a 6-string bass from low B, and off-the-shelf string sets will work, especially if they have taper or contact cores. When I got the first Warr Artisan (a semi-hollowbody touch guitar), I started looking at the choices available for six-string bass and found that several companies had sets of brass-wound nylon. After trying a few, I found what I thought was the best sounding of the lot. Even though they aren’t contact cores, they sit well on the piezo element, and give great tone and intonation.

The nylons can’t be heard by the Bartolini magnetic pickups on the Artisan, so the piezos are the only choice. They take about a week to stop stretching, and feel very loose under the fingers, like very light bass sets, but you soon get used to the feel. The tone is very different from the common tapped bass tone, and the high end can easily get scratchy. I found that my standard metal-string bass amp was not the right way to amplify the nylons, and that a good clean preamp, like a studio mic pre, gives the best sound. There are also amplifiers made for piezo pickup instruments, which sound even more acoustic.

Naturally, I’m not going to take that kind of rig to a gig, so I just cut the highs on my bass amp, and the guitar, to get the best live sound. The sound is very much like a fretted acoustic bass. Samples can be heard on the Warr Guitars website, and my own homepage.

5ths bass string sets have proven harder to create, since “normal” bass players hardly ever tune in 5ths, and manufacturers aren’t likely to produce string sets in that tuning for mass marketing. The problem is the slightly different gauges needed, and the need for unwound nylon on the higher strings of a standard 5ths bass from low C.

Trey Gunn is now playing a custom double-5ths fretted/fretless Artisan 9-string bass with King Crimson, with the fretted side having five strings in 5ths. I managed to get the highest (unwound) string on that side to the tuning machine by stretching it to the length needed with some pliers, and then trapping it in the locking tuner. Without the locking tuners it would have been impossible. The instrument sounds fantastic on the new King Crimson EP, and you can easily hear the fretless-side nylons on the title track. Trey gets a wonderful heavy-rock sound out of that instrument.

It’s next to impossible to get unwound nylon strings in the lengths needed for the Warr 34″ scale length at the moment, but I’m sure these problems will eventually be resolved, and Warr should have 5ths bass sets and guitar-side sets available in early 2003.

However, there are many other choices for guitar-side strings, and the most promising to me were white bronze strings, because they work with the magnetic pickups, as well as the piezos.

White bronze gives a more open, acoustic sound when wound around a metal core, and has the advantage of being a metal that doesn’t tarnish. They are made in six-string sets for acoustic/electric guitars, and I purchased a set from Carvin (though a few other manufacturers make them) and used the 5th. 4th, and 3rd wound strings from the set for the 12th, 11th, and 10th strings of my uncrossed 4ths tuning, which are the 3 lowest guitar-side strings, and the same tuning that most players use for a guitar side in 4ths (crossed or uncrossed) with high D. Those of you playing a baritone guitar-side tuning should be able to use even more of the wound white bronze strings.

I used standard strings for the highest 3 guitar-side strings, since they are unwound, and the strings supplied with the white bronze set were not long enough, and would have had to have been tied to other strings to make them long enough. (Tying strings is a necessary talent that all tappers should know, in case they get caught with a broken string, and no extra-length replacement, but that’s for another article. Randy Strom is the King-of-String-Tying and taught me how to do it, though I think I’ve added a few twists.).

The white bronze strings give a tone more like an acoustic guitar string, with brighter, ringing overtones and a bit more snap. Keep them clean, and they’ll last a long time!

The gauges I used were heavier than most Touchstyle players use, but I like the stronger output, and lower action that is possible with heavier guitar-side strings.

As Touchstyle guitar technology catches up with the options available for “standard” guitarists and bassists, more tones become available. For me, this makes life very exciting!

Jim Wright began playing the guitar in 1968, the Chapman Stick in 1978, and the Warr Guitar in 1995. He can be seen around the Los Angeles area playing jazz and progressive rock.
Contact Info: jim@warrguitars.com http://www.home.earthlink.net/~mrjwright/

ShareThis

An explanation of two-handed tapping.

What’s tapping? Tapping is a technique for playing fretted instruments. It’s the action of touching strings so they start to vibrate when they come in contact with a fret. This is also possible on fretless instruments to some degree.

One way of describing the technique in more detail is to compare it to more conventional guitar playing. When playing a guitar, the fingers on the fretting hand push the strings against the frets and the other hand plucks, picks or strums the strings so that they start to vibrate. When tapping, both hands do what the fretting hand does – touch the strings against the fretboard. The energy of pushing down the strings makes them vibrate.

Tapping on an acoustic instrument is difficult, although not impossible. The energy transferred to the strings when tapping is not big, so the strings have to be struck quite hard in order for the body of an acoustic instrument to resonate. This is why tapping is for the most part specifically a technique for playing electric instruments. Pickups on an electric instrument can easily transform the vibrations of a tapped string into a signal that can then be amplified.

Dedicated tapping instruments started to appear in the beginning of the Seventies, and these days there is a great variety to choose from. Not only are there several brands, but also variables like the number of strings, string configuration, tuning, scale length, and a wide choice of pickups and other hardware make it possible for everyone to find an instrument especially suited to their approach to tapping.

Just as there are different tunings for the guitar (e.g. DADGAD), there are also several string configurations and tunings for tapping instruments. Perhaps the most common string configuration divides the fretboard in two halves, with a group of strings dedicated to bass and chords (the “bass side”) and another dedicated to melody.and soloing (the “melody side” or the “treble side”). Of course, this division is by no means exclusive; both sides of the split fretboard can be used interchangeably, although as one side is tuned lower than the other, some things are more suitable for one of the sides.

In the most common configuration, the player’s hands cross the fretboard so that the bass side on the right (as seen by the player) is played with the left hand, and the melody side on the right is played with the right hand. This approach is especially suited to a style of playing where both hands make excursions to the other side as well. Also, the strings on the bass side are set up in reverse order compared to a standard guitar, so that both sides have the heaviest strings in the middle of the fretboard. Still another difference from standard guitar tuning is that the bass side is tuned in fifths instead of fourths as on the melody side. The fifths tuning gives the possibility to use very wide chords with an open sound, chords that would be difficult if not impossible to play in a fourths tuning because of the wide stretches between the notes. There are two major variants of this tuning, one with ten and another with twelve strings.

All details of the configuration can be varied together or separately. Thus there are players who have uncrossed their hands, interchanging the two groups of strings, while keeping everything else the same. Many players have switched to a fourths tuning on the bass side as well, as this makes reading from sheet music easier since both hands have the same chord shapes and fingerings. Changing from one setup to another usually involves just moving the strings around and setting the intonation.

Contact Info: http://iki.fi/ola/tapping/

ShareThis