Cyber capos everyone, are you as excited as I am right now?
You should be! I think the cyber capos are going to be really really cool if we can pull this off.
So a capo is a device that sits on the strings of a music instrument and make them shorter and
holds down the strings to the fretboard by itself.
But what's so cyber about our capo is that it's four individual capo's, one capo per string on the bass guitar
So capo or capodastro has been used since
1646 by Giovanni Doni or something like that. I read on Wikipedia
But they didn't have a cyber capo
I'm very happy for this idea. This has been an idea that has been long in the running and
The main idea is that it will save the resource
I have least of when playing the Marble Machine X - my hands.
I will be able to set all the four strings to the notes
I want them to play and
then leave the bass guitar and go do other things with my hand.
Pull the muting lever or play the vibraphone manually, or
speed up and speed down the Machine, whatever. And whenever I want the bass guitar to change chords
I can just slide the individual capos around into a new configuration.
Or I can also play the bass strings manually higher than the capos
Normally the loose strings on a bass guitar is E, A, D, G
So one way to use these cyber capos is just to set the lower notes to what I want them to be.
Maybe I want the lower notes to be a G-major chord, or
maybe I want the A string to play C. It's going to be very very useful and very very fun.
Ha, ha! Only on Wintergatan Wednesdays!
And here you can see there's a hole in the head of this bass guitar and this comes from the fact that
we're using a five stringed bass guitar with only four strings
So this hole is where the fifth tuner used to be and now I can use this hole for a mounting bracket
You saw I made a bracket with tape. If you can avoid making measurements
I always try to avoid making measurements,
just take real world measurements, so to speak.
That speeds up the process a lot. And I'm making some test fingers here
I'm just adding them to the linear bearings
So, with this measuring arm here, I can make sure the linear bearings are parallel with the strings.
So, I can see up here it's touching perfectly height wise. We go here, we need to shim the neck upwards.
This value is pretty close.
First I was just planning to weld the bracket on here and have it non adjustable
But now I realized that I will be very happy with an adjustable bracket
I'm making this bracket adjustable in every direction in the most idiotic way you can and I love it
I'm just making the holes oversized so it can go side to side and then I'm just gonna use
shim washers underneath it to adjust the height. It's really really the
simplest way I can think of of getting control in like four directions.
So, here you can see the height control and here you can see the sideways control and this will be very
important to make the linear bearings perfectly parallel with all the four strings
So now I'm adjusting the linear rails parallel in this direction to the neck.
I'm not going to do it parallel to the string. I think it's more important that it's parallel to the wooden neck.
Going to push down the string
I'm measuring with my
temporary fingers and I'm seeing that there's more space here, three millimeters,
and here's flush.
Means that we should remove some washers here.
Taking one of these out.
Now the height here is adjusted, we can start to check
this way. Our test point is touching the string.
Push it all the way up.
Camera is fooling that angle a little bit. It's actually
quite good in real life. I'm super happy about the airy design.
There's very bare minimum of parts. In addition to this big m10 bolt
We have these two m5 screws that are also clamping down to prevent this from sliding
so I tapped threads in the metal underneath and then,
to over-engineer this I have these set screws and they have a little sharp point
so once I clamp this down, they will really
prevent this part from sliding.
So this is not going anywhere and I left this bolt very long because it's gonna be
a support for later, to support the head from the Marble Machine X frame
But this right here is the first capo arm made from spring steel and this arm sits here
and touches the string here. When I was checking these tests
I was never really happy with how parallel they were with the strings and I thought just
well, I made some kind of miscalculation here, but I thought it was in OK range
But now I know why they're not parallel. I made a mistake
Let me show you. So first of all, here's the strings and we measured how much they're flaring out earlier
So we're seeing it kind of from this perspective now
Here's the linear rails and without thinking I made this parallel with E,
this with A but I know that that's not how the plan is. Because if you look at the routing, to reach the strings
we have to go from this linear rail
to the E string. From this one, over that arm, to the A string.
So this linear rail has to be
parallel with A string,
this one has to be parallel with E string and that was why they are not parallel.
So I recalculated these distances to the new set up and this is the number of extra washers
I need to put in between the spacing. So I use these washer stacks to make this system adjustable. So that turned out good.
So, here's the new setup and now you can see that the two middle linear rails are flaring out much more.
So, the test arm is now on the E string
sitting on the second linear bearing, the black line is above the string.
When we travel down the neck
it stays above the string. We nailed it!
This is par là. So I made this finger tip out of black Delrin and I cut two m3 threads in it.
Delrin is a good bushing material. It can slide over surfaces without
getting torn up.
Okay, so I want to add downward pressure
It's not pushing enough on the string. The way I'm doing that is to add
washers between the delrin and the spring steel
So, I think it's adding a little bit too little pressure
[Bass & singing]
You and me are gonna have a lot of fun together.
So now, three shim washers
[bass]
Uhh, I invested in some SM57's and check this out, these are the line boxes for the bass guitar
Deep talking bass. Here we go. Flat wound.
So if you listen here,
you can hear the wound. And here's the new flat wound.
It's almost completely flat. So if I want the sound of the flat wound, which I think I want, they will
wear down these delrin fingertips much slower.
So I never tried these line boxes, but there's two channels,
so I need two of these for the four channels of the bass guitar
and Marcus, the drummer from Wintergatan, recommended these. So it's going to be very fun to try them.
Okay,
so the purpose of this arm was to test
if the spring steel was strong enough and if the delrin seems like a good material choice,
and I think it's yes on both.
So we've done this and I can now make the correct arms all four of them
[piano]
[Marble Machine X testing]
The cyber capos, everyone. I love this. This is only a prototype because the linear bearings are too short
I can't really play the high notes with the system,
but I wanted to show you all these sketches from the team, because behind the scenes we have been working hard on a more complicated
version with an on and off systems you could click the capos up and down to have them go on and off the strings and
In the end I think we actually didn't reach a good solution,
so I decided to try a simplified prototype.
But I want to give a huge shout out
to the whole fantastic Marble Machine X team for pouring so much love and heart into this design discussion.
Maybe we can solve the on/off in future versions and, as always, I want to say a huge
thanks to all the Wintergatan patrons and Youtube members for
supporting this crazy pipe dream. With the cyber capos we're one step closer to having this machine actually playing some music.
It's getting there. It's taking very much time, but it's getting there.
Thank you so much for watching and see you on the next Wintergatan Wednesdays