Wiitar, a build log

wiitar

[Ozan] sent in this build log from when he made a Wiitar. As you can probably guess from the title, it’s a guitar combined with a wiimote. He has completely gutted the Wiimote and installed the internals in the guitar. Some toggle switches were mounted to control the button states on the Wiimote. This is a pretty useful setup as you can use the Wiimote data to control effects on the guitar. We’ve actually seen a very similar setup before. [Ozan] has included the build log, as well as a simple glovepie script and a sample effect patch.

Comments [14]

tagged: guitar, music, wiimote, wiitar

Reader Comments

WII-tar-did

Posted at 8:57 am on Apr 17th, 2009 by bob

What he said.

Posted at 10:07 am on Apr 17th, 2009 by anon

interesting. nice to have.

Posted at 10:23 am on Apr 17th, 2009 by clinton

As a guitarist, even as one who loves gaming, I’m going to go with “unless it has fully retained function as a guitar, I vote no.

Nope… don’t see that it does.

If you’re going to jump in with ‘hey the guitar sucked, so it’s OK’ then again, no. The time invested here could have been great tuners, smokin’ pickups, a feet sanding and action lowering, even if you’re not personally able, due to “my time is worth money.”

Posted at 12:15 pm on Apr 17th, 2009 by overclockedmind

Blasted autocomplete, that’s a *fret* sanding. My bad.

Posted at 12:16 pm on Apr 17th, 2009 by overclockedmind

Why not make the buttons push-able instead of on off switches? it would be totally sweet to have them trigger effects. I dont know? pretty guitar. It will blow peoples minds when they try and figure out why its working like that <since all guts are internal, and poking the leds through the body would be nice too… just a thought..

Posted at 1:43 pm on Apr 17th, 2009 by kyle007

I’m having a hard time understand the purpose. Maybe I’m Wii-tar-ded myself.

Posted at 4:12 pm on Apr 17th, 2009 by Shawn

Well, the purpose depends on your view of the instrument. It’s about what you care especially. If your main problems with the guitar are about the tuning, pickup tone etc. maybe this would seem nonsense to you. But there are folks that develop their own programs for fx and general logic control for music, and this controller provides an input to the processes and stuff the musician builds for himself.

The design of the electric guitar (and guitar itself for that matter) is not god sent overnight either, and I’m pretty sure there were people called the first electric guitars nonsense with all that pickups and semi-hollow bodies…. The electric guitar itself was invented for serving the needs of a particular individual and it turned out that a lot of people needed this “mod” but most didn’t notice. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not comparing this as a progression of something like invention of the electric guitar, but the pattern is similar. You need it, you build it. And it is useful for some, but of no value for others. Anyway, be assured that this is not being used for playing games, but for making music, even if the taste might not suit you.

If you are a straight guitar to amp guy, for example, this may really look non-sensical but if you’ve used something like Max/MSP, PD, SuperCollider etc. for music/audio programming, you’d immediately see its use. There are many people using this great controller for making music, just search for wii music, its a flexible controller that sometimes proves more valuable than traditional faders and knobs.

Posted at 7:56 pm on Apr 17th, 2009 by Batuhan

What the fuck is the point of this?
I don’t see it as being functional at all.
First of all, SWITCHES?
It also makes playing actual guitar a pain in the ass.

Posted at 11:44 pm on Apr 17th, 2009 by Ninja

batuhan: “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not comparing this as a progression of something like invention of the electric guitar, but the pattern is similar. You need it, you build it. And it is useful for some, but of no value for others. Anyway, be assured that this is not being used for playing games, but for making music, even if the taste might not suit you.”

—

This, I will admit I respect. New forms of music creation, I’m down. A real guitar becoming a Guitar Hero controller, so not down. Note that I do *not* intend to call this effort in particular a Guitar Hero controller.

Therefore, in this vein of musical exploration and possible advancement, I was a bit harsh. I was harsh on everything yesterday though, it was just the wrong day in general.

Posted at 7:27 am on Apr 18th, 2009 by overclockedmind

NEATO

Posted at 11:51 am on Apr 18th, 2009 by Rasputin's Nigger

“What the fuck is the point of this?” you ask?

Well, as a guitarist, you make all these movements with your instrument, that are good to get into the right mood, but do not effect your guitar sound directly. With the wii, you can give all your posings a meaning!

Here’s mine on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4xNpBYKtXg

I just upped it to Vimeo as well:
http://www.vimeo.com/4217911

Posted at 5:37 pm on Apr 18th, 2009 by Dave

hey people watch the video in the http://hackaday.com/2008/10/14/wiimote-guitar-effects-control/
to see what this does if you raise the guitar’s neck up you can simulate what your foot would do to a expression pedal like a waw waw or pitch shifter or reverse delay, also the on-off switches can trigger an effect or a loop to start.. caleb followed this up with a hyper link to an actual application for this project of course [ozan] probably should have stated what he was going to accomp with this project..

Posted at 10:30 am on Apr 20th, 2009 by kyle007

“ozan] probably should have stated what he was going to accomp with this project..”

Seems like he already did :

” Having an accelerometer on a guitar brings endless possibilities like : tilting the guitar for effect parameter changes, gesture recognition for switching things ( for example, jumping two times triggers a preset change.), data logging for estimating the performers position on the stage, etc. It is very easy to get lost in this sea of possibilities.As a part of my design philosophy, I try to capture and use the already present movements of the performer rather than forcing the performer to learn and move in a required way.

For example, one of my implementations includes using the body movements of the performer to attract the wavetable of a scanned synthesis engine, allowing the player’s moves to be the actual timbre. In an other implementation, incoming data is used to control the parameters of a real time generated backing track, allowing the virtual band to communicate with the performer in a more humanly way. ”

http://www.ozansarier.com/projects.html

Posted at 7:59 pm on Apr 20th, 2009 by jeff