guitar

180 Articles

3D Printing A Guitar Neck

April 1, 2022 by 11 Comments

A lot of first-time guitar builders focus on making the body and skip the neck, which has lots of tricky dimensions to get right to if you want a nicely playable instrument. However, [Jón Schone] of Proper Printing wanted to start with the hard part on his guitar building journey, and set about 3D printing a guitar neck in one piece.

Designing a neck might sound difficult on the surface of it, but the Marz Guitar Designer plugin for FreeCAD helps make whipping one up a cinch. Once imported into Fusion 360, the geometry is tweaked for 3D printing, particularly to fit the truss rod inside. Printed on a Creality CF30 belt printer (which interestingly enough, has been mounted to the wall) in green PLA, the resulting neck can be spotted as a non-traditional design from a mile away. With a truss rod hammered in, frets installed, and hardware attached, it’s mounted up to a cheap kit guitar for testing.

The printed neck works, and it’s given a proper shakedown with some appropriate riffs to put it through its paces. It’s reportedly a bit on the flexible side, but remains playable and is surprisingly normal in its performance. [Jón] now plans to continue the project by 3D printing the rest of the guitar.

Meanwhile, if you’re sick of tuning your own guitar, consider building a robot tuner to help out. Video after the break.

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Learn To Play Guitar, Digitally

March 2, 2022 by 13 Comments

Learning to play a musical instrument takes a major time commitment. If you happened to be stuck inside your home at any point in the last two years, though, you may have had the opportunity that [Dmitriy] had to pick up a guitar and learn to play. Rather than stick with a traditional guitar, though, [Dmitriy] opted to build his own digital guitar which is packed with all kinds of features you won’t find in any Fender or Gibson.

The physical body of this unique instrument is entirely designed by [Dmitriy] out of 3D printed parts, and uses capacitive touch sensors for each of the notes on what would have been the guitar’s fretboard. The strings are also replaced with a set of six switches that can be strummed like a regular guitar, and are used to register when to play a note. After a few prototypes, everything was wired onto a custom PCB. The software side of this project is impressive as well; it involved creating custom firmware to register all of the button presses and transmit the information to a MIDI controller so that the guitar can communicate digitally with anything that supports MIDI.

To finish off the project, [Dmitriy] also added a wireless device as well as some other bonus features like an accelerometer, which can be used to augment the sound of the guitar in any way he can think of to program them. It’s one of the most innovative guitars we’ve seen since the prototype Noli smart guitar was unveiled last year, and this one is also on its way from prototype to market right now.

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Travel Guitar Hacked With Digital FX Setup

January 14, 2022 by 8 Comments

[Courcirc8] was a big fan of the ALP AD-80, with the travel guitar being a surprisingly competent instrument despite its folding form-factor. However, the onboard headphone amp left something to be desired, so it was time to get hacking.

To achieve better audio output, [courcirc8] decided to purchase an iRig HD 2 guitar interface, and installed it inside the body of the compact guitar. The original volume pot on the guitar was instead spliced into the iRig circuit, and a switch hooked up to allow the guitar to output clean tones to an amp or the digital audio output of the iRig instead. It’s a tight fit inside, but it all nestles in there rather neatly when finished.

The result is a compact guitar that has a capable digital FX platform built in to the body; all one has to do is hook up a smartphone to gain access to a broad selection of software effects.  It makes the guitar much more of a Swiss Army knife when playing on the road.

We’ve seen others before installing guitar effects into the instrument itself; it remains perhaps one of the best ways a hacker can express themselves with a completely individual instrument!

Active Pickguard Makes For A Great Guitar Mod

December 13, 2021 by 6 Comments

Much discussion goes on in the guitar world about the best hardware to use. Whether its pickups, how they’re positioned, or even the specific breed of wood on the fretboard, it’s all up for debate. [Eli Hughes] put much of that to one side, however, with his innovative “Active Pickguard” project.

The project reimagines the electronics of an electric guitar from the ground up. Instead of typical electromagnetic pickups, six individual piezo pickups are built into the bridge – one for each individual string. The outputs of these pickups is conditioned and then read by the analog-to-digital converter of a Freescale Kinetis K40. The DSP-capable chip can then be used to apply all manner of effects. [Eli] demonstrates the guitar providing an uncanny imitation of an acoustic guitar, before demonstrating jazz and overdrive tones as well.

The Kinetis chip also features touch-sensitive inputs, which [Eli] put to good use. All the hardware is built into a pickguard-shaped PCB, complete with touch controls for things like volume, tone, and choosing different DSP patches.

Unlike a regular guitar, this one needs a power supply, which it gets via a CAT 6 cable, in place of the usual 1/4″ guitar cable. The CAT 6 also carries audio out to a converter box which allows the audio to be output to a regular guitar amplifier.

It’s a neat build, and one that shows just how modern technology can reimagine a simple 20th-century instrument. DSP really is magic, after all. Video after the break.

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Guitar Pickguard Adds MIDI Capabilities

December 6, 2021 by 1 Comment

For a standard that has been in use since the 1980s, MIDI is still one of the most dominant forces on the musical scene even today. It’s fast, flexible, and offers a standard recognized industry-wide over many different types of electronic instruments. Even things which aren’t instruments can be turned into musical devices like the infamous banana keyboard via the magic of MIDI, and it also allows augmentation of standard instruments with other capabilities like this guitar with a MIDI interface built into the pick guard.

[Ezra] is the creator of this unique musical instrument which adds quite a few capabilities to his guitar. The setup is fairly straightforward: twelve wires run to the pick guard which are set up as capacitive sensors and correspond with a note on the chromatic scale. Instead of using touchpads, using wires allows him to bend away the “notes” that he doesn’t need for any particular piece of music. The wires are tied back to an Adafruit Feather 32u4 microcontroller behind the neck of the guitar which also has a few selectors for changing the way that the device creates tones. He can set the interface to emit single notes or continuously play notes, change the style, can change their octave, and plenty of other features as well.

One of the goals of this project was to increase a guitar player’s versatility when doing live performances, and we would have to agree that this gives a musician a much wider range of abilities without otherwise needing a lot of complex or expensive equipment on stage. We’ve seen a few other MIDI-based builds focused on live performances lately, too, like this one which allows a band to stay in sync with each other.

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Bass Guitar Gets Shapeshifting Pickups

December 5, 2021 by 19 Comments

Electric guitars were the hip new thing back in the mid-century. The electrification of the common and portable guitar opened up a lot of avenues in terms of sound and technique. Specifically, the use of the pickup, an electromagnetic device which converts the vibrations of the guitar strings into electrical signals, increased the number of ways that a musician can alter the guitar’s sound on-the-fly. Some guitars have several rows of pickups which can be used in any number of ways, but this custom guitar has a single pickup which can be moved around the guitar’s body instead.

[Breno] was gifted this Dolphin bass guitar to start learning after years of playing a regular guitar, and while they aren’t known for high-quality instruments this guitar seemed to play and sound well enough to attempt this modification. First, a hole had to be cut all the way through the guitar’s body in order to accommodate the build. The pickup for this guitar is then mounted on two rods which allow it to move in various positions along the strings, and a second set of adjustments can be made to bring the pickups closer or further away from the strings. Some additional custom circuitry was added to control it and also to handle the volume and tone knobs, and while this was being added [Breno] and his friend [Arthur] decided this would be a great time to build some effects into the guitar’s now-custom electronics as well.

While this was largely a project for [Breno] to understand in greater depth the effect of moving the pickups around an electric guitar, the finished product looks ready to play some live shows. The addition of some extras like the effects really adds some punch to this guitar and it looks to be completely original. The nearest thing we could find is this guitar which uses hot-swappable pickups but even those are mounted in fixed locations.

Automatic guitar tuning robot

Handheld Bot Takes The Tedium Out Of Guitar Tuning

September 24, 2021 by 13 Comments

Even with fancy smartphone apps and custom-built tuners, tuning a guitar can be a tedious process, especially for the beginner. Pluck a string, figure out if the note is sharp or flat, tighten or loosen accordingly, repeat. Then do the same thing for all six strings. It’s no wonder some people never get very far with the guitar.

Luckily, technology can come to the rescue in the form of this handy open-source automatic guitar tuner by [Guyrandy Jean-Gilles]. The tuner has a Raspberry Pi Pico inside, with a microphone attached to the ADC. The program running on the Pico listens for the sound of a plucked string and determines whether the note is sharp or flat. The Pico then drives a small DC gear motor in the appropriate direction, which turns the peg the right way to bring the string into tune. The tuner makes ample use of 3D-printed parts, STLs for which are included in the project repo. [Guyrandy] has also made some updates to the project to make the tuner a little easier to use.

While there’s an affordable commercial version of this — upon which [Guyrandy] based his design — we really like the fact that he rolled his own here, and made the design freely accessible to everyone. We also like the idea that guitarists who can’t use tuners requiring visual feedback can use this, too — just like this one.

[via r/raspberry_pi]