For my first prototype, let's take my Arduino and solder wires all over the insides of this.

Well that was easy. Digital inputs on practically everything, except the potentiometer which is wired to Analog Input 0.

Now for the fun part: using the ever comfortable, highly productivity enhancing Arduino IDE. Because I'm a pleb engineer, I didn't roll my own highly efficient MIDI implementation, and instead just dumped in the Arduino MIDI library.

The way this works is:

• buttons (start, select, tilt) fire "General Purpose" MIDI CC messages: on when held, off when released.
• Whammy bar sends Pitch Bend messages to drop the pitch of all playing notes.
• When upstroke or downstroke strum buttons are pressed, the Frets are read, and one of 2^5 (=32) sets of 6 notes are selected. These are played one at a time with some microsecond delay between, to simulate actual guitar strumming.

At least, that's the theory, but there are some bugs in the prototype. One of the frets seems permanently stuck "on", the whammy bar sends pitch bend nonstop all over the place, and so on.