Electric Guitar Shocks You For Missing A Note

Rocksmith is a popular video game that works like Guitar Hero, but with a real guitar. You have to play well and hit the right notes, or the game penalizes your score. [Lightwing] took the stakes up a notch, though, adding a system that shocks the player every time they fail.

To achieve this, it was necessary to detect when the player missed a note. Initial attempts involved using Tensor Flow AI to detect the game state from the screen, but it was unreliable. Instead, the game’s memory was read to achieve detection. When the player misses a note, a certain section of memory changes, and a script reads the change in game state. It then sends a signal to an Arduino which triggers the stun gun’s fire button, which shocks the player holding the guitar.

As you might expect, the documentation for this project includes a video which involves plenty of gratuitous electric shocks when [Lightwing] makes mistakes. Fair warning — there’s plenty of colorful language when the stun gun fires. Generally, a powerful shock ends with screams a dropped guitar, and too much fear to continue.

It’s painful enough that it’s probably not a useful teaching tool for learning the guitar. We’ve seen similar shocking builds before, too, like this simple wire game.

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Building An Old Guitar From A New One

Anyone who’s ever played guitar to at least the skill level required to form a terrible garage band knows the names of the most legendary guitars. The driving sound of the Gibson Les Paul played by Jimmy Page, the upside-down and smooth Fender Stratocaster from Jimi Hendrix, or the twangy Rickenbacker made famous by George Harrison are all lusted-after models. The guitar that [Frank] really wanted was a Danelectro DC59 and since they’ve been steadily creeping up in price, he decided to build his own.

The body of the clone guitar is hollow and made from effectively scrap wood, in this case plywood. As the original guitars were in fact famous for using the least expensive materials possible, this makes it a great choice for a clone. [Frank] made the guitar using almost exclusively hand tools and glued everything together, but did use a few donor parts from a modern Stratocaster-type guitar. With most of the rough shape of the guitar finished, it was time to add the parts that make the guitar sound the way that a real Danelectro should: the lipstick-style pickups. He purchased these completely separately as they are the most important part to get right to emulate the tone and feel of the original.

With everything finally soldered and assembled, [Frank] got right to work recording a sample audio track which is included at the end of the video. It certainly sounds like the original to our untrained ears, and for around $100 it’s not a bad value either. If you’d like to see a guitar built from the ground up without using another as a clone, take a look at this build which brings a completely original guitar into existence, entirely from scratch.

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Making A Tape Echo The Traditional Way

[Juan Nicola] has taken inspiration from the musician hackers of old and re-purposed a reel-to-reel tape recorder into a tape-echo for his guitar with a built-in valve amplifier (video in Spanish).

The principle is to record the sound of the guitar onto a piece of moving magnetic tape, then to read it back again a short time later.  This signal is mixed with the live input and re-recorded back onto the tape further back.  The effect is heard as an echo, and this approach was very popular before digital effects became readily available.

[Juan] installed a new read-head onto his Grundig TK40 and managed to find a suitable mechanical arrangement to keep it all in place.  He has since updated the project by moving to a tape loop, allowing an infinite play-time by re-using the same piece of tape over and over.

Turning tape machines into echo effects is not a new idea, and we’ve shown a few of them over the years, but every one is slightly different!

Both versions are shown after the break.  YouTube closed-caption auto-translate might come in handy here for non-Spanish speakers.

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ADSL Router As Effects Pedal

Moore’s law might not be as immutable as we once though thought it was, as chip makers struggle to fit more and more transistors on a given area of silicon. But over the past few decades it’s been surprisingly consistent, with a lot of knock-on effects. As computers get faster, everything else related to them gets faster as well, and the junk drawer tends to fill quickly with various computer peripherals and parts that might be working fine, but just can’t keep up the pace. [Bonsembiante] had an old ADSL router that was well obsolete as a result of these changing times, but instead of tossing it, he turned it into a guitar effects pedal.

The principle behind this build is that the router is essentially a Linux machine, complete with ALSA support. Of course this means flashing a custom firmware which is not the most straightforward task, but once the sound support was added to the device, it was able to interface with a USB sound card. An additional C++ program was created which handles the actual audio received from the guitar and sound card. For this demo, [Bonsembiante] programmed a ring buffer and feeds it back into the output to achieve an echo effect, but presumably any effect or a number of effects could be programmed.

For anyone looking for the source code for the signal processing that the router is now performing, it is listed on a separate GitHub page. If you don’t have this specific model of router laying around in your parts bin, though, there are much more readily-available Linux machines that can get this job done instead.

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A Guitar From Scratch

You can pursue your dreams of rock superstardom with any guitar, be it from an expensive luthier, a pawn shop, or a mail order catalog. But to join the ranks of rock greats there’s one way to have a truly special instrument, which is to build it yourself. [Bensoncraft] may not be [Bryan May]’s dad or indeed [Eddie van Halen], but he has at least joined the exclusive ranks of home made guitar builders with his video “Guitar from scratch: hard mode“.

It’s a fairly long video and we’ve placed it below the break, but a compelling one as we learn just how many operations go into making an electric guitar. When he says hard mode he’s not joking, there are no pre-made parts save for the strings and he’s not following a set of plans. Everything including the tuners and pickups are made from scratch, but for a non-guitar-player it’s she sheer number of different pieces of wood that go into making the solid body and neck of the instrument that’s so interesting. Even if you’ll never make a guitar you should watch it.

We’ve never seen a guitar build quite like this one before, but we have brought you a 3D printed guitar body, and neck.

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Classic Amp Revived With A Pi

Guitar amplifiers have a hard life, and as anyone who’s run a venue can tell you, they often have significant electrical issues after a life on the road. [Dsagman] had a Vox amplifier with fried internals, and rather than repair the original he rebuilt it with a Raspberry Pi inside to provide a fully-loaded array of effects.

Though the subject is the Vox, it’s best to see this as more a tale of how to create a guitar effect array in a Pi than specifically put it in an amplifier. The Pi has an audio board and an MCP3008 ADC added to it, and using those two it takes its inputs from a series of potentiometers and process the audio passing through the audio board. In addition there are a series of LED indicators and an LED bar graph to keep the user in touch with what’s going on.

The whole lot is nicely integrated in the VOX case with all the potentiometers on an aluminium panel. He discusses amplifier choice, but as you might expect the final choice is a Class D module. All in all an amp many readers would probably go for.

As long-time readers will remember, guitar effects have made quite a few appearances around here. Continue reading “Classic Amp Revived With A Pi”

MIDI Controller Looks Good, Enables Your Air Guitar Habit

We all want to be guitar heroes, but most of us have to settle for letting a MIDI board play our riffs using a MIDI controller. [Joris] thinks a MIDI controller should look like a cool instrument and thus the Ni28 was born. Honestly, we first thought we were looking at wall art, but on closer look, you can see the fretboard and the soundhole are festooned with buttons.

Actually, they aren’t really buttons. The Ni in the name is because the buttons are nickel-plated brass plates that act like touch switches. There’s virtually no activation force required and you can easily touch more than one plate at a time.

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