Chapman Stick

The Chapman Stick is an electric musical instrument devised by Emmett Chapman in the early 1970s. A member of the guitar family, the Chapman Stick usually has ten or twelve individually tuned strings and is used to play bass lines, melody lines, chords, or textures. Designed as a fully polyphonic chordal instrument, it can also cover several of these musical parts simultaneously.

The Stick is available with passive or active pickup modules that are plugged into a separate instrument amplifier. With a special synthesizer pickup, it can be used to trigger synthesizers and send MIDI messages to electronic instruments.