The Chameleon Guitar — so named for its ability to mimic different instruments — is an electric guitar whose body has a separate central section that is removable. This inserted section, the soundboard, can be switched with one made of a different kind of wood, or with a different structural support system, or with one made of a different material altogether. Then, the sound generated by the electronic pickups on that board can be manipulated by a computer to produce the effect of a different size or shape of the resonating chamber.
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Interesting. They still have a way to go.
I think that this will follow the same path as digital photography. When digital photography started, photographers lamblasted it. They complained that the color weren’t rich enough, and that digital could not ever meet the quality of a high-end film camera. They were right. But over the last 10-15 years digital cameras have improved and now match the professional film cameras. There are still some hard-core film purist out there. But their numbers are getting smaller and smaller.
You see the same story when music CD’s replaced vinyl albums. When DVD’s replaced film.
Purist guitarist will of course hate this, and will never find it good enough. They may be right…. for now.
1 RL. Except you haven’t gone far enough. The digital photography analogy requires that the guitar be solid state with electronics shaping the waves produced by the pickups into perfect representations of any instrument. What you have in the above example is more Rube Goldberg.
RBG
Their proposed sample rate/size will make live music sound a shitty CD, what an advancement!
Um… this has already been done digitally, long ago. Look up the Variax on line6.com. I’ve tried the bass version, and while it sounds pretty good, the instrument itself looked and felt horrible to me.
#4 I had a Variax 300 that had a low end feel but the 700 is a nice guitar.
These guys look like they want to build quality… sign me up.
Not to po-po this; but, this isn’t revolutionary, it’s an evolutionary twist on what already exist, a Yamaha Synthesizer(Yamaha uses a keyboard and not strings as input).
“The original signal is not synthetic, it’s acoustic,”
1st they get the original signal from the five electronic pickups on the soundboard. These provide detailed information about the wood’s acoustic response to the vibration of the strings.
2nd feed that into the soundboard and thereby “simulate different shapes, or a bigger instrument.”
Again this isn’t revolutionary, it’s an evolutionary advancement on what already exist, but without the above guitar body and guitar string as input, hence just a tweak on exiting technology.
Media Lab doesn’t do anything useful. The sum total of their production is Lego Mindstorms and Grinning Evil Death.
Line 6 Variax and Roland have already accomplished what these guys are shooting for. What they overlook is the quality contained in all the other variable parts,the look, feel, finish that contribute to the character and sound of each and every guitar. Great sound can be made with digital processing. Great music contains more than sound. Or as Neil Young put it, “There’s more to the picture than meets the eye.”
I’ve thought about this idea for DECADES, ever since I saw the first guy on stage wearing a keyboard like a guitar.
Someone needs to make a BRAND NEW, TOTALLY REDESIGNED instrument for the computer/MIDI/synthesizer age.
… and it should be totally ergonomical — which guitars and pianos certainly are not.
Both those instruments takes HOURS or even YEARS of training, just to learn to contort your hands properly.
On my fantasy instrument, you could begin to make cool music with two fingers and two minutes of learning.
But, it would be scalable so that you could also spend a life-time mastering it.
I have to go with #6, noname,
Again this isn’t revolutionary, it’s an evolutionary advancement on what already exist,
Yes you can shape the waves any way you like, but you end up shaping them all the same way / amount. By using the guitar to influence the shaping now you can add special shapes you couldn’t before. Hence, evolutionary.
#7, Lyin’ Mike,
YOU don’t do anything useful.
Give me hundreds of millions and then talk.
#10: You want a theremin or a beamz
and if the chameleon curcit breaks it gets stuck in the last used shape?
is this guitar also bigger on the inside than on the outside?
This thing sounds like crap. It’s an electric guitar. (Not a very good one.) Nothing more.
What ever happened to the fine Gibson hollow body? Not many takers anymore.
Dean also makes a great guitar. Try this site, don’t click anything, just wait, and hopefully the Dean Best Guitar Winner will come up. What chops. About 1.5 min.
http://deanguitars.com/home.php
This is an interesting experiment and nothing more. Did I see him flip up the tailpiece to insert that soundboard? Gaaahhhh! No way is this beast stiff enough to do justice to most guitars. The finger noise clashes with the spanish/flamenco guitar sound, where nylon strings are common. And a pick? Yikes.
Then, they’re using what pickups, exactly? That’s yet another important factor in the sound of any instrument, especially acoustic guitars. I doubt this idea is headed anywhere outside their lab.
Maybe so for this too, but it’s far more interesting:
http://wired.com/wired/archive/12.01/guitar.html