The ArduGuitar EN

The ArduGuitar EN

This is Bob and he will talk about ArduinoGuitar

It is his project and it's about a guitar

that has no other controls than its strings.

And I think it's a quite interesting project.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Can everyone hear me.

So, I will talk about the project itself

and everything that came before the project

because I didn't know much about any of this stuff

when I started playing with it, so I will tell you a little bit

about myself and how this whole thing happened.

There's a lot of things that I might mention, that you might not know about, but you can use Google, right.

Everyone can use Google.

Alright, so, there's two things that you might wanna know about me.

There are two things that are really characterize me.

I have a lot of dreams. I spend a lot of time just sitting around and dreaming.

And I used to have very little money all my life, you know.

Practically no money.

So with dreams and no money you learn to scrounge. You really, you learn to scrounge.

And when you find something you learn to fix it.

And when you fixed it you don't want it to break anymore. You got attached to things you got.

That's me. You develop an ability to fix anything, which I think I have today.

Practically anything if I really want. But on the other hand once I fixed it I get attached to it and I don't wanna it to break.

So this fear of losing it.

You know, poverty, dreams and stuff becomes sort of a mixed blessing when you have this.

You have stuff and then you're afraid to lose it. A song says

'When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose'

But it's not really true. It's when you got nothing you can not afford to lose anything.

That's really how I looked,lived most of my life.

And there's another aspect that I'm very tenacious.

So I have this sort of never give up attitude.

That's also a mixed blessing in a lot of ways.

And one last thing about me.

I usually like stuff that nobody else likes.

I mean, I'm the only one who buys the one little thing in the shop that has been there on the shelf

for hundred years and nobody wants it because they don't know what it's for.

Because they just don't like it.

So, this whole project started. Does this work. I guess not. How do you change slides.

There we go. Electric guitar.

So this whole project started. I was as a kid I always been a hippie. I'm still a hippie.

Living in the sixties and all that. Play electric guitar, want to play the guitar,

couldn't play the electric guitar, couldn't afford an electric guitar.

Get a lot of junk electric guitars, have to fix them.

Don't know how to fix them. Anyways, I had this idea about electric guitars.

And so first what is an electric guitar really.

It's got these things in the middle here. This is one of my guitars.

It's a guitar that propably no one's every seen before.

There's only two of them in Belgium.

It's made in Canada.

This one has two, they call them 'pickups'

That's where it captures the vibrations of the strings to turn it into an electrical signal.

And then here you have a switch which basically which roots the signal from the pickups to the volume and tone controls

which are here on this guitar. This has one volume and one tone.

And then it all goes out through the jack to the amplifier.

It's pretty simple. I mean it seems pretty simple.

Although it took me a long time to understand.

So that's what a guitar is.

Now here is what I know about electronics.

That's it.

You're laughing. You're laughing, but I didn't find it very funny.

I spent a lot of time, even that, it seems so simple and it is simple, but it took me a long time to understand things like

a voltage divider. What is this?

I'm still not sure if I really understand.

Anyways, so that was way I was for like thirty years of my life.

I had guitars.

They never worked. And I got a job, a real job, a serious job.

And I had some money.

And so I decided to learn to play the guitar at last. I'm an old man now.

Old hippie.

So I got a serious guitar. And a serious guitar requires serious adjustment.

You know I can fix anything.

Things that break. Things that are expensive. You don't wanna just tweak with.

So I brought it to a luthier, a guitar shop.

Luthier is a fancy word for guitar maker.

And these guys adjusted the guitar and I learned a lot from these guys about guitars,

about technology. And I learned that basically everybody wants the same thing that Jimmy Hendrix played

That's all there is. The whole music industry is based on Jimmy Hendrix played a left handed stratocaster

Not everybody is left-handed, but everybody wants a stratocaster.

So, that's it.

That's the number one selling guitar.

And that's it. The technology hasn't changed. 1950s. They invented all the stuff

and it hasn't changed. And nobody wants it to change

because everybody wants to be Jimmy Hendrix.

And the mechanical potentiometer and the capacitor and a little mechanical switch. That's it.

That was from the 1950s and it hasn't changed.

And even now a guitar is in five figure-prices, I'm saying a twenty thousand or a thirty thousand

dollar guitar. It's still the same guts inside. Nothing special.

Ok, maybe the pickups are little bit more sophisticated. Maybe the wiring is really poorly put together.

There are twenty thousand dollar guitars that looks like they were soldered by a child.

And I've seen it. I wouldn't believe it because on one point I was thinking about buying one of those

at a special price but when I saw the guts I was like 'Forget it, forget it!'.

So, you know the 60s. I love the 60s, because of hippies and because of peace and love

and all that kind of stuff. It was great and I, for long time I regret it, but then came along Internet

and the 21st century and I found the 21st century is not too bad either.

And in fact it's really cool, especially the long tail. Living on the long tail is a cool place to live.

And everybody here, we are all on the long tail whether we know it or not.

So, talking to these guys and I started thinking why has the guitar has to be so old fashioned.

Why can't it be in 21st century, you know.

Why does it have to have these mechanical things and you know there is all kinds of stuff.

For example the guitar I showed you. It does some cool stuff. It's not just an ordinary guitar.

It does some pretty cool stuff.

So, basically you have you know the two pickups you have either one or the other or both.

So, both in parallel, both in series. Series is already an advance, I mean this only something that became

imagined later, much later.

But this guitar has all of that. And those are very, very sophisticated pickups, which were only invented I guess

ten, twelve years ago.

They are very sophisticated. It's a very sophisticated guitar.

But it offers both the neck, the bridge, the neck is the top one, the bridge is the bottom one,

so you can have the neck, you can have the bridge, you can have the neck and the bridge is series

the neck and bridge in parallel. So that's already pretty sophisticated for a musician.

It's already incomprehensible for most musicians.

My guitar teacher when I tell him he says 'What do you mean, what are you talking about?'

See, well, I was just saying 'Jazz and Rock' - 'Oh, I get it, I get it...'

So, but even that, so what does that mean? That means, you have this little switch has four positions.

There is one for each thing. And if you want to start turning things on, turning things off.

Everything you need the mechanical switch and you want to have individual tone controls, individual volume controls.

Everything means more mechanical stuff. And pretty soon you have your guitar just covered with buttons.

And nobody knows how it works. Even yourself. Even if you built it yourself.

You still can't rememeber which button to push to get this sound. It becomes just a mess.

So, I thought, my vision was lets get rid of all this electromechanical crap and put a screen on it or

make it have a curcuit in there and have it a screen where you can have it synthetic and you can do all kinds of stuff.

So, why not, why can't that be.

So that was my vision. It was to have some kind of curcuit on an Android phone an Bluetooth and in there

In there could some kind of thing, I don't know what, an Adruino it turned out to be.

That was my idea and it seemed easy enough. Modern technology and and all that stuff.

[Vehicles, IR], it's good enough.

And why didn't it already exist? Well, I have a lot of friends or friends of friends in the music industry.

And they all came up with the same answers.

They is two reasons. First of all it's just unbelievably complicated. You need a team of engineers.

Hundreds of years of development and it's just really complicated. And this was from professionals, from

engineers in the music industry. This is not just from musicians.

And then the other thing was just nobody wants it. It's just ridiculous.

Everybody wants to have a knob and a switch. That's what musicians want. That's it.

That's all there is. So just don't waste your time.

I didn't really waste a lot of my time, but I kept thinking about it.

And since I didn't know anything about electronics it was kind of a handicap.

You know, what to do about this and how to make progress. So this idea just bang around in my head for a while.

And then nothing happened. And then I used to go to a lot of TED conf, I still do go to TED conferences in Brussels,

I live in Brussels and they got the TEDx there.

And you get a lot of inspirational guys talking and I went to one of these.

I had a good time with that and I was thinking, you know, is it really impossible to make this?

Or is it just people are scared of it? Let me think about Marshall McLuhan.

Does anybody know here who Marshall McLuhan is? One person? That's it? Two? Three? Four? Five?

Marshall McLuhan was a great thinker, he thought about mass media in the early 50s/60s and he

predicted Internet in 1962. He predicted the arrival of Internet will be a great thing.

He said 'In this new age the human kind will move from individualism and fragmentation to a collective

identity. A global village.' So invented the phrase 'global village'.

But he wasn't thinking about computers. He was thinking about the electrical network that ran

throughout the world. He tought that was going to bring the entire planet together like electricity and the net, the electrical net.

He was a cool guy. And he also thought about a lot of cool things like why inovation is so hard?

And he said this second part, which is really [a proporto] to my project and probably to a lot of

things people do here is that

Whenever you look at something new all you references are in the past, so look at something new you just think

'Well, is it like this or is it like that?'

So, a Mac is like Windows, right?

Macintosh is like Windows?

Everything is referring to the immediate past so that makes it hard to understand something that is

radically new. And it puts people off in general from things that are radically new.

So, I was thinking all this people have told me that nobody wants this stuff and it's impossible to do.

Is that just fear and misunderstanding or is there more to it?

But I had no way of knowing what that meant what was going to happen.

I always think of this story, the Henry Ford story. Which is, he was interviewed.

I don't think this has acutally happened, but he was interviewed and was asked

'How did you know people would like your car? Did you go and ask them before? Use your survey?'

And he said 'If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.' And, you know,

he wasn't interested in making faster horses.

So, all this things were going on in my mind and then I went to last years TEDx in Brussels and Mitch Altman was speaking there.

Is Mitch by any chance in the room? No, well, he was there and he gave a very inspiring speach about

hackerspaces and all that kind of stuff.

So, I nearly jumped on him because he's an electronics guy and I said 'Here's my project.'

'What do you think?' - 'Of course, of course, it's so easy. Of course, you could do it. It's a great idea.'

'Go and do it!'

That was enough, one guy. Never seen before in my life, convinced me that I should do it.

Fine. All these experts told me 'Forget it, forget it, forget it.'

And so, it's a shame he's not in the room, but he gets a slide.

So that's you know, he hook me. He said contact the hackerspace community.

I didn't even know there was one in Brussels. I mean, 'Brussels'.

Anyway, there's a huge hackerspace community in Belgium and Brussels and I was amazed about this.

So that's the meta part of the project. Thank you.

Now we can talk about the technology and the stuff which is maybe interesting maybe not.

So, that's a potentiometer, right?

Most people know what it is. You got the thing you turn and it moves the wiper, the 'W' up or down.

And means that means, that one resistance gets bigger and one get smaller, right?

It's really simple. So, then we are having an analogue signal, a sinusoid, coming from the pickups.

The question was how could you make that controllable digitally, somehow.

I thought about putting servos, motors all kind of stupid things. I had lot of stupid ideas.

But I put this out on a hackerspace mailing list and people had all kinds of answers,

but it all seemed to be like they were, it wasn't criticism, but they didn't know what I wanted.

And I felt like there was real some kind of, you know, did you see 'Cool Hand Luke'?

'What we got here is failure to communicate.' And then they whack him over the head. Great movie.

Paul Newmans masterpiece.

Anyway, it was a failure to communicate and that is something I learnt a lot in this project.

You ask questions and they make perfect sense to you, but nobody else can understand what you are

talking about. You ask a question in a forum, you say 'I got this thing and this thing.'

And people don't answer or they ask you with crazy things. And you realize, that they don't understand.

And they did not understand.

So, finally though after a lot of questions being tenacious, you remember tenacity, we got to an

answer by Johannes Tallman who's a brilliant scientist. Is he not here either?

Well, he's in the [?] space. And he just said 'Why don't you do it with a LED LDR?'

I didn't know if that was a word or if that was acronyms. I said 'Ok, great. Tell me more about was that is.'

So, actually a LED LDR is really a LED, a light, and a light depended resistor.

So you have something that shines light and then you have something that changes resistance when you shine light on it.

And you put those two together and that makes a digitally controllable resistance.

Because you can shine light more or less. You can pulse it with PWM. So now you have a

digitally controllable resistance. And if you put two of them together like in a picture you get something very

similar to a potentiometer. And all you have to do is manage the current. And in the mean time I've been

playing with, I got get inside with Arduino, I saw Banzi on TED and I got the book and I bought an Arduino

and I could make the lights blink and it was great, everything was great. All the problems were solved.

It seems so simple. Cause like. 'What's wrong with you people? This is so easy. This is so unbelivably easy.'

So, I started doing it, but somebody on the mailing list said 'You know', I quote this

'You certainly worked to some extend and even if the result is to noisy or bad quality to be used in music

it will still be huge fun to make.' And I thought to myself 'What? Noisy? Where is noise coming from?'

'How can? Vehicles IR! Where is noise in that equation? I don't get it.'

But that was kind of staying in the back of my mind, you know, who cares?

Went on. By the way, LED LDR is, actually in the industry they're called 'Vactrols'.

There is actual a component, that has the whole thing build in one and they are made by different companys.

The best company is Perkin Elmer. If you buy them just put my name in the [?] I get them on my commission, ok.

So, that was easy. So now I had the fundamental problems solved and I just had to learn how to do it,

I read 'Making things talk' by Tom Igoe, later corresponded with and found out he didn't test

all the code in his book. So here it is. So the idea was really you have a guitar, an Arduino in there,

a bunch of vactrols and then you have some kind of Bluetooth and some kind of device, a computer or

Android. I've never seen an Android phone in my life at the time, but I figured that would do it and it will be really easy.

Yeah and it was. So here is the really geeky part. This the schematic. I only made it because the person

revising my presentation here told me to make it more technical because this is a technical conference.

Alright, so here is the technical stuff. You wanted it, you get it.

In the upper left, there, you can barely see it, but there is three, I put three pickups, this guitar has

three pickups and you see there is one sort of double pickup, which is exactly what it is.

So this three pickups. They come in.

So the top one goes in and you have the red wire goes to a vectoral(?), which is just an on and off vectoral(?).

It's got no variable resistance just shine all maximum light and it let's maximum electricity through.

It's not perfect. The vectors(?) I use have about 80 Ohm resistance when they are full on.

But you can do a little better than that. I didn't buy the right vectors. I couldn't understand the datasheets.

It's so complicated. Why don't they just say what I want?

Anyways.. So there you have it. Each of the pickups goes into a vector(?) Those top four