Hey Man, SSH To My Guitar And Setup The Multitouch

The Misa Digital Guitar is a digital music controller like we haven’t seen before. The body, machined out of ABS, looks like a guitar. The player puts theirs hands in the same places you would on a guitar but the lack of strings make it something different.

The left had manipulates inputs in the form of 144 sensors, six in each of the twenty-four fret positions. The right hand doesn’t strum, but uses a multitouch screen to control the inputs. The UI looks solid, something you’ll have to see for yourself after the break. Tieing this all together is an AMD Geode processor running Gentoo Linux. That means this is open source and begging you to make it do your bidding.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2eiP12hQQY]

[Thanks Zerowizard]

37 thoughts on “Hey Man, SSH To My Guitar And Setup The Multitouch

  1. This is pretty cool, I’d certainly like to play with one. Pet peeve though: it’s over-engineered. Could probably be done with one microcontroller (take the AVR32 for example, which has an LCD controller).
    That aside, this thing rocks… literally and figuratively!

  2. From their site: “The screen is an 8.4″ LCD 800×600 resolution. The CPU is a 500MHz x86 compatible AMD Geode which makes life easier, I guess. The operating system is Gentoo Linux which I’ve stripped down to be as lean as possible. Graphics (framebuffer access) is done with DirectFB which acts as a fast layer on top of the hardware”

    Looks like the guts of a small laptop (netbook?) with touch screen embedded in the body of the guitar.

  3. Holy F’ing cow. only the 20th and already a hack of the year quality project.

    Thank you hack-a-day for delivering all the great tech directly to our desktops!

    Seriously I only dabble in hacking and moding but something like this would be a damn good reason to get more educated.

  4. @Agent420,
    Yeah the number one option I’d like to see added to version 2 would be improved communications with a PC. Maybe over USB(not equipped) as well as OSC (possible with existing hardware, but not implemented).

    @eric
    Over-engineered? I want MORE processing power on it. I’d like to see it become sort of an all-in-one device capable of doing nearly everything a traditional computer does for digital musicians now. Imagine recording and editing an album-length rock opera in a full blown-sequencer suite right on the same instrument you played it on!

    1. Making it an all in one would be silly I think. It is much easier to edit with a large monitor. I see the advantage here is akin to moving guitar pedals to the body with near limitless customization.

  5. Please don’t kill the sound of a distorted guitar by passing it through a decimator, it’s the worst effect ever invented that ruins every sound you feed into it. I wouldn’t give a half buck for a real or electronic guitar that sounded like that. Use a virtual fuzz effect instead.

    Other than that, this guitar is just… wow!
    I hope to have enough money the day he makes a black one with multicolor leds under the frets, lol!:)

  6. I’m awaiting his answer.. the website says it won’t give out prices, but I asked if maybe he could estimate. We just got our tax return so I have some cash. I asked him if he could at least me know under $499 and under, $500 – $999 or $1000+.

    Those Starr guitars are ugly.

  7. The response I got:

    “Not sure yet as to the price or availability. I don’t want to promise a price I can’t deliver on… Hope you understand :)”

    I guess that’s reasonable.. but I’m sure someone can guesstimate within even $250? Sure mass production would bring costs down.

    Eitherway I’m interested.. I think these would sell like hotcakes if a music store carried them.

  8. The thingy could be nice but look twice: the controllers on the fretboard do not support bending or hammer-on and are not even touch-sensitive: only on/off per note so far.
    The touch-pad is on/off either.

    So it is a nice toy, if it comes at a toy-price…

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