The Optical Guitar
True story. Back a few weeks ago, I had this sudden flash of a vision of a technology so cool I figured it just had to have a patent in it. Everything about it made sense, I thought, and it would revolutionize the industry. I told May, she went to sleep leaving me laying there with diagrams and schematics racing through my brain.
Flash forward to yesterday and there it be, live and in colour, the feature on MusicThing, who said this was just wrong, but it’s not.
It’s not ‘wrong’, it’s just already invented … back in 1977! and patented, and in production, and after 30 years it is still not catching on because, now that I see it, nobody in their right mind would want a 9v transformer pack tethering their drop-dead ugly Kinetic-MAX to a wall socket.
Nevertheless, here’s Ron Hoag, the k-max guitar and his surprisingly cheesy scrunched-image website for the Amazing Light Transducer for Musical Instruments:
“MAXIMUM KINETIC ENERGY, SUSTAIN. has more audio range than other pickups. Also, is more responsive to the touch and…”
[ HOAG GUITARSý PRESENTS ]
He needs flaming rotating guitar GIFs, minimum. But bad webdesign and infomercial presentation apart (give ‘em a break, he’s a 50 year old techie geek musician, unlike me who’s a vibrant young 49 year old de-geeked musician) there’s some very keen merits here: LED lights shine across the strings to an optical resistor measuring the umbral image as a modulated luminocity loss, and in plain english that means the transducer will measure vibration in anything that moves … you can use nickel, bronze-wound, nylon, you can even use cotton strings and Ron has the MP3 to prove it. It’s also non-invasive optical, and that means no magnets dampening the strings, and the dynamic range and frequency response are such that you could detect 40 octaves above a high-E from a distance of 40 miles, a real bonus if you play for whales.
source: The Optical Guitar
