Stringless Digital Guitar
January 24th, 2010 by ComputerBob
Many years ago, I was a professional singer-songwriter-musician for 5 years. I wrote over 50 songs and my wife and I did 427 performances in 26 states, for audiences ranging from 9 people to over 3,000 people.
I played the 12-string guitar, which plays just like a 6-string guitar, except that instead of playing 6 individual strings, you play 6 closely spaced pairs of strings. When you play a barre chord, you have to barre all 12 strings with your index finger, and when you play regular chords or individual notes, you have to press one or more pairs of strings with each finger. The two strings in each of the 2 highest-pitched pairs (B and E) are tuned the same, but the 2 strings in each of the 4 lower-pitched pairs of strings (E, A, D, and G) are tuned an octave apart. Those octave strings are what gives a 12-string guitar such a full sound, compared to a 6-string guitar. I always thought of it as the difference between hearing someone play an electric organ in the corner of their living room, and hearing someone play a pipe organ in a huge cathedral.
Anyway, I kept playing my guitar for enjoyment, in church bands, and for short performances, for many years after we stopped performing for a living, but the last time I tried, my fingers still remembered how to play — and I’m sure that they always will — but the fingertip callouses that had once allowed me to slide up and down the strings with impunity were gone.
Ouch.
I mean, seriously. Ouch.
I started playing the guitar back when I was 12 years old, practicing and practicing until my fingertips bled, to try to build those callouses.
I don’t think I have that kind of youthful dedication to playing the guitar any more, but I’ve read that rubbing your fingertips with rubbing alcohol several times each day, or soaking your fingertips in either rubbing alcohol or water with either alum or salt in it can help build new callouses faster.
In the past, I’ve often thought that some day, someone would invent a guitar without strings, to eliminate the need to develop callouses. I invisioned it as having touch-sensitive pads on its neck, and short little string-like wires on its body that could be plucked, strummed, fingerpicked, or otherwise played.
And now, a software engineer has finally invented a truly stringless guitar.
The Misa guitar has touch-sensitive areas on its neck that you finger like a traditional guitar.
But, instead of the short wires that I imagined on its body, it has a programmable LCD screen that you manipulate with your other hand.
Inside, there’s a 500 MHz CPU — running Linux.
Because the Misa is completely digital and MIDI compatible, it’s really more of a guitar/synthesizer hybrid that can interface with sequencers and samplers and every other type of electronic equipment you can imagine.
So it can sound like anything you want.
Its price isn’t finalized yet, but you can already sign up to be notified when the first Misa guitars will be available for purchase — according to its Web site, that should be in about a week.
I think that its inventor will soon be a multi-millionnaire.
Here’s the Misa guitar Web site.
And here’s a video demonstrating how to play power chords on it.
But because I can’t tell how a guitarist would play individual notes on it, let alone play lots of them really quickly (tapping different areas of the LCD screen with 2 or more fingers?), I hope that he’ll release a video that demonstrates a blazing lead guitar solo.
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Consumer Info, Engineering, Entertainment, Hardware, Linux, Personal, Technology, Video
November 20th, 2010 at 12:39 pm
Hello,
Stumbled across your site when doing a search for stringless guitars (I dislike callouses as a byproduct of being a touch typist in my day-to-day life… and callouses are a constant irritation… like having an itch you can’t scratch… ever). Really off putting when learning to play.
Anyhow, I did want to pass along some promising alternatives to the MISA guitar (which is still very cool).
If you’re looking for a guitar to sit down with now, there are a few I’ve found:
You Rock Guitar - It’s a game controller gone awry, but it’s supposed to be reasonably priced and not too shabby.
Yamaha EZ-AG Guitar - It’s an educational guitar by Yamaha (so I’d think it’s of decent quality). Seems a little less geared to hooking up to computers, etc. (than the You Rock), but still looks easy enough.
If you pick up this thread, I’d love to know if you encounter anything interesting.