Horribly Complicated Electric Guitar Keyboard

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Gutarist, hacker, and mustache enthusiast [David Neevel] brought together way too many pieces of hardware in order to use his electric guitar as a computer keyboard.

So let’s dig into the house of cards he built for the project. It starts off with the guitar which has been fitted with an additional pickup to interface with a Roland GR-33 synthesizer pedal. That outputs a MIDI signal, which many hackers would have connected to the computer and parsed with a simple script. But not [David], he connected it to an Arduino via an optisolator. Well that’s not too ridiculous, right? Don’t you think he’ll just parse the MIDI signals and push them to the computer via the Arduino’s USB port? Wrong! He translates the MIDI signals into combinations for a big relay board which is emulating the key matrix of an old USB keyboard. But as you can see in the demo video after the jump it works quite well.

If you’re more of the drumming sort there’s an electric drum set version of this hack too.

[Thanks Dale]

32 thoughts on “Horribly Complicated Electric Guitar Keyboard

  1. Finally, a Digital Instrument Musical Interface, or as I like to say: “DIMI”.

    Didn’t like that? How about, “He puts the ‘GUI’ in ‘guitar’?” Actually, it’s more ‘tactile’ or ‘audible,’ but that just isn’t as cute.

    Did David build (or at least layout) that relay board himself? Nice.

    Next step: replace common words with chords. ;)

  2. David, if you’re interested in a collaborative piece with the drum keyboard, drop me a line. It would be trivial to add a piano as well. The only question is — what to type?

  3. Unexpected, impressive, overly complex/engineered, the perfect hackaday post :)
    Someone show this man the arduino leonardo, may save him a few bucks on the relays and custom board (but probably not as much fun).

  4. MIDI => USB, MIDI => Arduino => VUSB, etc… So many easier options.
    Nice build, that relay board look home made. I really would like to know why he choose these options.

    Nice work and it works, can’t say that of most electronics projects…

  5. @static OMG THAT should have been his hackaday claim to fame. I personally LOVE the cream filling, but hey, anyone who can first turn out an awesome robot to get rid of it, then make arguably the funniest robot demo videos I have ever seen, deserves clean cookies.

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