Forty Years of Emmett's "Free Hands" Method

      August 26, 2009, marks the 40th anniversary of Emmett's discovery of his two-handed parallel tapping method known as Free Hands. Stick Enterprises is celebrating this milestone with a new Free Hands logo.
      Until that date forty years ago only a few electric guitarists, beginning in the 1940s, had explored two-handed tapping. The first of these was pickup designer Harry DeArmond, who taught Jimmie Webster, who in turn inspired guitarist and luthier Dave Bunker to build a double neck guitar with features specifically designed for string tapping, including the first under-string damper. The three of them referred to their two-handed tapping technique as the "Touch" system.
      Their tapping techniques had one thing in common, the right hand was held at a conventional playing angle, with the fingers lined up substantially parallel to the strings, not parallel to the frets as with the left hand. This involved the whole right arm moving at the shoulder joint in order to play consecutive scale notes along the strings. All three pioneering guitarists developed this approach to a fluent performing level, and Bunker continues to make two-handed tapping music and instruments to this day.
      Emmett had never tapped on strings before August 26, 1969, and knew nothing about these earlier tapping musicians, whose work remained largely unknown to guitarists and to the general public. Inspired by the complex harmonies of pianist McCoy Tyner, the explosive soloing of saxophonist John Coltrane, and the distorted blues rock of Jimi Hendrix, Emmett was constantly redesigning and adding devices to his guitar - more strings and frets to expand the range, even a gear-shift lever to operate a "wild string" with his right elbow.
      His one innovation that would forever change how the guitar could be played had nothing to do with devices, however. Emmett's discovery, on his homemade nine-string "Freedom Guitar", was to tap the strings independently with each hand's fingers lining up parallel to the frets, coming from opposite sides of the board. The whole thing happened in an instant. He began tapping, and almost immediately raised up the neck, making both hands "true equals" on the fretboard for the first time, with the right hand equally capable of fretting chords and complex melodic lines just like a guitarist's left hand.

      Almost immediately Emmett began performing with his new method around Los Angeles with established jazz musicians including guitarist Barney Kessel and drummer Les DeMerle. He even toured for two years with singer Tim Buckley. He also performed live on the nationally broadcast TV show "What's My Line". Requests for Sticks eventually lead him to found Stick Enterprises in 1974. That year he began publishing his method book, Free Hands: a New Discipline of Fingers on Strings. Since then thousands of musicians around the world have taken up this approach, most of them on Chapman Sticks, but also on their own guitars, electric basses and other specialty instruments inspired by Emmett's Free Hands method.

More about Free Hands

For more on Emmett's moment of discovery,
please see Jim Reilly's 2004 article:
"Parallel Hands"

and also Emmett's own 1987 article
from Electronic Musician Magazine:
The Evolution of a Musical Art"

      If you'd like to use this logo in your promotions, please let us know. It may be used freely for non-commercial purposes as outlined in the Creative Commons license cited above. The method name of Free Hands is not copyrighted, so please feel free to use the term when referring to the method of tapping with parallel hands invented by Emmett in 1969.

Emmett on "What's My Line" (1974).



Video of Dave Bunker using the "Touch System" (1960).
In the Touch System, the right hand fingers are parallel to the strings.

Free Hands
Emmett's parallel two-handed tapping method book, has been in print since the mid 1970s, sent out with over 5000 instruments.