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Step 6Put it together and play
Now you can hook the laser pcb to the main pcb. Drill a hole for the audio jack and put it in. Solder the wires from the fret buttons to the according pots if you havent done this before for testing. Make a hole in the back of the body into the place where the batteries used to be in the toy and put the battery clip through. I used the same velcro that was already in place to hold the 9V battery.
Now it should work. If it produces tones when you break the laser beams you can start to tune it.
I tuned the 3rd string one octave above the 1st and the 2nd in between, so its a chord when all strings are played at the same time, tune it the way it works best for you. It just has to be a chord because of the fret buttons that raise the pitch of all strings together which is a bit limiting.
Now try what you can play on it, simple basslines dont sound that bad and chords really sound quite metal-like, only the square waves dont seem to mix very well when playing lower pitched chords. Its a bit unusual that you dont feel the "strings" so you need some other position reference if you dont want to look down all the time.
As i mentioned before, its the very first version and can still be improved. A crazy effect on the tremolo bar could make up for the limited tone range. I will try a low-pass filter to simulate dampened strings to make it more metal-like. Maybe forget the fret buttons, make a new casing and make an optical solution for the frets... It would be much cooler if the lasers went all the length of the guitar anyway but they can only be interrupted once and i dont know how to use them as position sensors - maybe someone else knows? Let me know if you have done a better version.
The idea of a laserguitar is too fascinating so im sure to see more of that in the future. Lots of inventions have been made by several people in parallel at the same time.
After writing this i found it... it has been done before, also with buttons on the neck but with midi...
http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~handiono/techpage/laserguitar/
And this one is on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sgdlaRv2hk
Now it should work. If it produces tones when you break the laser beams you can start to tune it.
I tuned the 3rd string one octave above the 1st and the 2nd in between, so its a chord when all strings are played at the same time, tune it the way it works best for you. It just has to be a chord because of the fret buttons that raise the pitch of all strings together which is a bit limiting.
Now try what you can play on it, simple basslines dont sound that bad and chords really sound quite metal-like, only the square waves dont seem to mix very well when playing lower pitched chords. Its a bit unusual that you dont feel the "strings" so you need some other position reference if you dont want to look down all the time.
As i mentioned before, its the very first version and can still be improved. A crazy effect on the tremolo bar could make up for the limited tone range. I will try a low-pass filter to simulate dampened strings to make it more metal-like. Maybe forget the fret buttons, make a new casing and make an optical solution for the frets... It would be much cooler if the lasers went all the length of the guitar anyway but they can only be interrupted once and i dont know how to use them as position sensors - maybe someone else knows? Let me know if you have done a better version.
The idea of a laserguitar is too fascinating so im sure to see more of that in the future. Lots of inventions have been made by several people in parallel at the same time.
After writing this i found it... it has been done before, also with buttons on the neck but with midi...
http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~handiono/techpage/laserguitar/
And this one is on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sgdlaRv2hk
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