The shred neck bass thread got me thinking...

[T-Bird]

Hi.

This thread about the silliest things I've seen in quite a while:

has anyone seen the shred neck?

reminded me about an idea I had 20 years ago.

What if it had 12 frets instead of 7?
What if it would send MIDI data?

IIRC in the advent of MIDI there was a "manually" tracking guitar and a bass to fight the latency problems. The frets and strings just created the matrix rather than trying to guess the pitch from an analog waveform and then convert that to a digital stream. Tried to search info about it, but no luck. Anyone remember that bass?

Could that matrix approach be used here?

That MIDI project bass I dreamed of was one of the many "I will do that someday" projects of mine that never got done . IIRC the idea was to do the prototype with an etched PCB as the fretboard, that seemed as the quickest solution.

Additionally, is there a matrix to MIDI converter/chip on cheap, so I don't have to gut my KBD for it? If I decide to pursue this that is.

Any input is highly welcome.

Regards
Sam

[Bard2dbone]

Are you remembering the SynthAxe?

Before midi there was a guitar-shaped instrument that you played like a regular guitar, but every fret was actually six little switches and playing a note actuated that switch. You couldn't do bends or vibrato, but it was very cool to hear an organ when you saw a guitar being played. It was called a Guitorgan.

Look them up. For all I know they may still make them.

A guy who called himself Teisco Del Rey (Yes just like the cheap-o import guitar company from the '60's) wrote a column about odd guitars that had great tones in Guitar Player back in the day. He was a big fan of guitorgans. He had several as I recall.

[T-Bird]

Hi.

Thanks Bard2dbone, that was most probably the one I was thinking about.

http://www.hollis.co.uk/john/synthaxe.html

I do remember seeing a video where Gary Moore played one .

What a weird looking contraption. In -86 £10k, no wonder I wanted to do "my version" of it .


Regards
Sam

[Bard2dbone]

Check around. See if they ever made a midi-compatible guitorgan. I bet that thing could be a monster nowadays