excellent concept, poor application. surely choosing a well known piece which is royalty free is a far better way to show it off? I’m listening to this and CRINGING at the composition.

I thought the music was pretty good and the machine was impressive. I think in terms of servos too much because it always surprises me how much can be accomplished with what appear to be stepper motors.

@marty: With regard to robotic instruments, why play something that a human guitarist can play, when you can play something a human guitarist could never physically play? Thus, you have to, well, DIY. I like it.

Music is an interesting place for physical computing to be so popular if you think about its roll in society in the past. It’s been a performing art, something that people spend their lives mastering, filled with emotion and feeling. Something people aspire to being able to achieve. I’m fascinated by the mechanics of this project but as a live music fanatic there’s just not that level of improv, direction and feeling(currently anyway… and somewhere inside I hope there won’t ever be) that can be found in a good live performance where a band is just operating on the same wavelength but by no means mechanically.

saw this when you did the story on the competition a ways back. I liked it so much it is now on my MP3 player.

@dax:
The machine does have mutes, they’re right under the rotating picks.
Check out the video from about 2:03-2:15. You’ll notice that the screaming overdriven string on the right isn’t using the mute at all, while the ‘pluck-pluck’ strings to the left are.

Shouldn’t that be spelled “league”?

taking the ‘robot guitar’ thing in a somewhat different direction, we have a street performer locally who’s a retired engineer.

He plays a fiddle in the conventional manner, and made himself an automatic guitar so he could accompany himself!

it’s powered by a treadle operated by his right foot, and plucks chords that he selects by pressing pedals with his left foot – the plucking seems to have more than one set of cams as I’m sure I’ve heard more than one plucking pattern.

i reckon it’s a pretty cool hack, making a guitar possible to play with your feet. :-)

There are a couple of movies of it in action on his myspace page

http://www.myspace.com/akafilm

it’s quite a sight, and fascinating to watch him play it right there in front of you.

someone needs to throw the ebow on this.

Sounds very much like a sitar, minus the bass.
Awesome!

I loved that Eric Clapton video. Boy can he play the guitar well. The machine will be replacing musicians in the future…ha ha.