Chapman Stick Railboard pickup, "Meet the R Block™"

00:09
This is the rail board. It's a new instrument from Stick Enterprises. And today, I'm just going to show you a little bit of the different sounds that you can get out of the new R block pickup module. It has to relax passive pickups, and it also has an optional active mode, which I've got it in right now. I'm plugging it into XLR phantom powered inputs on my Mike preamp so that the basic sound of the instrument full range is like this.
00:39
So that's with the tone controls bypassed and there's no scooping out of the midrange. Each side has a midrange cut knob and you have four different frequency selections, kind of vowel sounds that you can be scooping out on there. And those sounds influence the basic sound as well. So here's the full normal sound, unfiltered. And then there are three kind of vowel sounds like our all and all.
01:14
And if I switch between them, you'll hear it's kind of subtle, but when I scoop out the mids, you'll really hear the differences.
01:28
Same is true on the bass side. So you've got bypass the air R and all, and then the air scooping them out. You've got the bypass sound with a big midrange scoop and then air all and all so you can hear what's happening with the harmonics. Really interesting kind of wah wah vowel sounds. Maybe I'll play a little bit of a bass groove for you so you can see how that works.
02:12
As for differences, sounds, the R BLOCK has stereo and mono modes selected by this toggle switch. In stereo mode. Each set of strings goes to its own output. When I switch it over to mono mode and both volume parts are both turned all the way up, then each set of strings goes to both outputs equally. When I turn the melody pot all the way down, then both sets of strings go to the bass side, and when I turn the bass pot all the way down in the melody pot all the way up, then both sets of strings go to the melody side.
03:06
If I then turn the melody pot all the way down and both parts are all the way down, then it's off happy tapping.