Where is Touchstyle Going?

What does it all mean?

T

apping is starting to be big and getting bigger; and with your interest in learning this innovative style, you’re riding an expanding demographic shift in our popular-music culture.

My own experience was not untypical. In my youth, I’d played songs on guitar but did not pursue music until many years later, until one day I heard a synthesizer and decided to learn to play keyboards. Reading music magazines, I stumbled across an advertisement for Emmet Chapman’s Stick instrument, and searched around to find one used. The search was lengthy, but I found one and began learning to play it.

The two-handed tapping method seemed to have several features I liked. It allowed me to use two-handed technique much like playing a keyboard, but with fingers directly on strings, it felt more like playing guitar. It seemed to be a logical approach, affording more opportunity to my interest than had either guitar (which uses both hands to play a single melody line and upon which chords and melody simultaneously is complicated) or keyboards (tied to a lot of synthesizer equipment).

In other words, for me it felt like a natural and logical way to make music. It felt like * my * instrument!

Maybe it will feel like that for you too, no matter whether you’re tapping on a standard bass or a guitar, or on one of the specialty tapping instruments. For a survey of specialty tapping instruments, feel free to visit my website at http://www.traktortopaz.com/ and visit the ‘Instrument Museum’ in the Resource Center. There you’ll find descriptions of the main specialty instruments along with pictures and contact information for the manufacturers who are bringing these instruments to the world.

I believe there will come a day in the near future when tapping will be as common as picking and strumming, and instruments like Mobius Megatar or a Chapman Stick will be as common as electric bass or guitar. Fender and Gibson might jump on the bandwagon and you’d see specialty tapping instruments on the wall of any music store in the world. MTV will have tappers inventing wild gyrations while tapping out new and interesting pop rhythms.

And you’re part of it.

Thanks for your contribution. See you tapping down the road!

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