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Midi Guitar Controller

Guitar-like Midi controller for playing chords

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I cannot play the guitar, but I always thought it would be possible to make something that looks like one and just triggers some MIDI instrument. A bit like the Guitar Hero thing, but with the ability to choose your own sounds and really play it.
And there is already something like the 'Aeroband', which allows playing like a real guitar, but with fake strings. And now there is the LibreLive C1, which is more like the guitar-hero thing, but mainly for playing full chords. And the latter looks like something that is not too difficult to re-recreate using a MIDI cable microcontroller and some touch sensors.

The LiberLive C1 , or the Lava Genie is what I'm looking at. These are really cool shaped string-less guitars, which can be neatly folded:

Basically you just select the chord by touching the right position on the neck,and then trigger it using the paddle. But triggering individual 'strings' using the single-note section on the lower end of the neck seems a bit more natural to me. Which is more like the AeroBand guitar does. This a fake string section that you can actually finger like on a real guitar.

There is an open-source project at Instructables with an attempt to build something like this using an impressive number of touch sensors. But this is also meant to simulate the whole guitar, including all positions on the fret-board.

So my idea is to make the strumming part using six touch sensors which will look and feel a  bit like real strings, and just select the right chord on the neck.

And, again, it looks like KontrolFreak did almost exactly that. And he is using the Teensy...

  • Choosing the Controller

    Cees Meijer2 days ago 0 comments

    If you are doing something with music or MIDI, the Teensy boards by PJRC are an almost obvious choice. The emphasis for these boards has always been heavy towards music, with all kinds of sound creation and mixing capabilities and full support for MIDI.

    So I happened to have a Teensy 3.5 lying around, which I never used so far. And it indeed seems the ideal controller for this project.

    As you can see in the image it has got plenty of I/O. Unfortunately it does not have 'Touch' input like the 3.6. ( But neither has every other Teensy, so I'll have to find a solution for that.) The TeensyDuino ecosystem provides a really simple way to do USB-MIDI commands. Something like this:

    usbMIDI.sendNoteOn(note, velocity, channel);  
    usbMIDI.sendNoteOff(note, velocity, channel);

    Yep, it could not be simpler than that, I suppose.

    OK, the 3.5 is no longer in production, but I suppose this could be done using the 4.0 or 4.1 as well. As mentioned, these are also missing the dedicated 'Touch' pins. But that can be solved by using something like the FastTouch library, which actually should work on any Arduino board. And in the description of this library there is even a mention of the Teensy 4 so I assume that is covered.

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