Reader Julian Pröll, senior designer for the industrial design company formquadrat gmbh, sent us word about a new design concept for a touch-sensitive guitar, right.
The design, which explores the use of touch-sensitive plastics, combines multi-touch sensors with social media integration.
The guitar offers three primary touch fields (neck, drum area and touch wheel). It can connect wirelessly to a variety of devices.
The guitar is based on the touchskin technology developed by plastic electronic. touchskin provides capacitive technology on freely formed plastic part surfaces.
There’s not a lot of information on the formquadrat site about this touch sensitive design guitar design concept & Pröll did not leave contact info. If you’ve got more information on this design, leave a comment!
“combines multi-touch sensors with social media integration.” WTF??? Social Media? Seriously?
That bit of trendy marketing aside, I think this is a dumb concept. A guitar has strings, and those strings are THE key ingredient in how it sounds, behaves and how you need to interact with it (play). You can’t simulate touching six vibrating strings through a flat screen touch interface. The sound? Sure, but not the human touchy-feely part. A guitar shaped instrument with touch capabilities instead of strings may be cool, but it is definitely not a guitar, it’s something new. Learning to play one has nearly no relationship on the other, and in fact, if I had a touch based instrument I wouldn’t want to tune and play it like a guitar. This has already been done properly, and it’s called an Eigenharp. This is just a piece of crap generated as one-upmanship to guitar hero.
BTW… this counts as item #4 in my Namm Rumors list… “an ugly guitar that does something ridiculous”
🙂 https://www.synthtopia.com/content/2012/01/09/namm-rumors-2012/
Cause all this time I’ve just been wishing my guitar could link to Facebook!
Maybe it can tweet when I’m really rockin out…?
Well , screw the social media crap…thats the jargon that sells stuff these days so thats ok..dont care how and what it does…maybe soundcloud uploads?
Anyway, I still think that as a instrument this can be awesome.
A extended touch interface with the same contour as the familiar guitar is great to have…imagine a pedal steel guitar type thing.
Or maybe a Haken Contiuum on the side ?….will be great if somebody can pull it off.
Pat
xtopher,
what you’re forgetting is you can’t use a conventional guitar to control a synthesizer especially well. Sure you could fit one with a midi pickup but the issues with latency and controlling soft synths is still there. Something like the iTar (currently just a prototype) or the misa kitara allows for a more integrated way of doing this, much in the same way you would use a midi keyboard. This means for guitarist/producers like myself that want a guitar type layout for playing midi sequences dreams are coming true. Social networking on a guitar though! WTF!