The guitarist Jimi Hendrix had a unique sound which has influenced countless musicians over the decades. He achieved it through mastery not only of his instrument, but of the complex feedback relationship between amplifier, environment, and guitar — coupled with a series of effects pedals including some then-unique ones made for him. Musical commentators have […]
We’ve all built projects that are a rats’ nest of wiring and feature creep, but the best projects in the end are usually those that use a simple solution to elegantly solve a problem. [Kauz] had been thinking about a unique type of electric guitar pickup for a while and rather than purchase an expensive […]
Sometimes, all you need to make something work is to come at it from a different angle from anyone else — flip the problem on its head, so to speak. That’s what [Keizo Ishibashi] did to create his Cantareel, a modified guitar that actually sounds like a hurdy-gurdy. We wrote recently about a maker’s quest […]
If you’re looking for a long journey into the wonderful world of instrument hacking, [Arty Farty Guitars] is six parts into a seven part series on hacking an existing guitar into a guitar-hurdy-gurdy-hybrid, and it is “a trip” as the youths once said. The first video is embedded below. The Hurdy-Gurdy is a wheeled instrument […]
Got some spare filament and looking to build a guitar you can truly call your own? [The 3D Print Zone] has created a modular 3D printable guitar system that lets you easily mix and match different components for the ultimate in customization. The build is based around a central core, which combines the pickups, bridge, […]
For better or worse, the fundamental design of guitars has remained familiar since they electrified around a century ago. A few strings, a fretboard, and a body of some sort will get you most of the way there for an acoustic guitar, with the addition of electromagnetic pickups and wiring for electric variants. However, technology […]
How any string instrument sounds depends on hundreds of factors; even the tiniest details matter. Seemingly inconsequential things like whether the tree that the wood came from grew on the north slope or south slope of a particular valley make a difference, at least to the trained ear. Add electronics into the mix, as with […]
When the electric guitar was first produced in the 1930s, there was some skepticism among musicians as to whether or not this instrument would have lasting impact or be a flash-in-the-pan novelty. Since this was more than a decade before the invention of the transistor, it would have been hard then to imagine the possibilities […]
String instruments have a long history in civilization, helping humans make more complex and beautiful music. We wonder what our forebears would think of this guitar strummed with 1000 picks? [Mattias Krantz] wondered what the best number of picks was to play guitar and took the experiment to its illogical extreme. Starting with zero picks […]