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