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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 has been used on music recordings 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. A Stick looks like a wider, longer version of the fretboard of an electric guitar, but more strings. Unlike the electric guitar, it is usually played by tapping or fretting the strings, rather than plucking them. For this reason, it can sound many more notes at once than some other stringed instruments, making it more comparable to a keyboard instrument than to other stringed instruments. This arrangement lends itself to playing many lines at once and many Stick players have mastered performing bass, chords and melody lines simultaneously.