Stereo Guitar

July 27, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 39 Comments

stereo_guitar

[Megatronix] wrote in to show us this pretty crazy guitar mod. He has re wired the pickups to make the guitar a “Stereo Guitar“. Generally, the two pickup locations on a guitar are there to provide tonal variation. You can adjust the influence of each to get the sound you want. [Megatronix] decided to re wire the setup so that one is the left channel and one is the right. Thus providing actual stereo sound from his guitar. This will limit his tonal variation considerably, but should at least serve as a proof of concept. We really want to hear a recording of it in action though.

La Guitare à Crayon

July 15, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 15 Comments

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/5212424%5D

As with most electronic musical instruments, we saw this in the tip box and expected the usual random noises to show off the instruments range. Consider us pleasantly surprised. They cut strait to it and showed us what la Guitare à crayon really is. It is an instrument of both audio and visual art. You draw while you play. The guitar appears to have a wacom attached to the front where you would normally strum. different areas of the wacom seem to effect the music much like a string being plucked. In one of the videos we see some fret board action as well. Watching the screen, we can see that she is drawing a picture, and we are in fact hearing that picture being drawn. The site has a section for source code, but states that it will only posted if there are requests. We are officially requesting it, we want one. May we suggest some improvements? Get some color variation, possibly opacity too. Gimp can do it with the wacom. We can’t wait to see how this project matures. How about another video? Watch it after the break.

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The Prism: Laser Synth-Guitar

July 13, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 23 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HP2zbGes2Bg]

This is an interesting instrument. Part laser harp, part guitar, the Prism seems to have some potential. [Jeff-o] put some major time and effort into refinishing a guitar, building the circuit and putting it all together. He did a great job, the instrument looks fantastic and appears to work. We do have a request though; please post a video of it being played as an instrument. So many of these electronic instrument projects just spit out random noises. While we understand that some people are into that, we would love to hear some control. How about intentionally changing notes to make a melody? Based on the description, it should have control for pitch, and even speed of the oscillation. So let’s hear some music. We don’t care if you’re any good, just please play some music with it. If you would like to build your own, he has the schematics and PCB layout available for download.

Wiitar, A Build Log

April 17, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 13 Comments

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.

Tesla Coil Guitar Amp

December 7, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 18 Comments

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

You’ve probably seen musical Tesla coils already. People have wired them up to computers and keyboards to make them serve as dangerous and awesome speakers. This video popped up of someone playing his guitar through one. It is rough, and not very good at polyphony, but still cool. We would like to see several coils, split by different filters to be able to hear more of the guitar chords. If only someone had rigged these up for Queen when Flash Gordan was made.

Fender Bender, Weird Sound Guitar

October 15, 2008 by Eliot 9 Comments

[danwagoner] recently completed a restoration of his very first electric guitar. Instead of going the normal route, he modded it to be a Weird Sound Generator. The WSG is a popular kit sold by Music From Outer Space. His creation, dubbed Fender Bender, has a custom pick guard cut from an old motherboard. There are multiple knobs on the pick guard plus three buttons on the neck.

Wiimote Guitar Effects Control

October 14, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 17 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmuggHx_H5Y]

[Rob Morris] sent us this video of his Wiimote based guitar effects. Similar to our post yesterday about using the Wiimote to control a synth, he is using changes in orientation to effect the sound. He starts off with simple pitch modulation, but later in the video he’s doing, uh, we’re not sure but its kind of cool.