May we introduce the SensGuitar - an innovative new type of guitar

[MarcusGrum]

Dear Community.

For 6 years we have been working tirelessly and secretly on the most innovative guitar that, to the best of our knowledge, currently exists in the world. It is not ready for production yet, but a prototype for hobbyists is what we want to show to the world.

Since we are fan of this community, you are one of the first people we contact about this: we want to show the prototype of this guitar to the world on Kickstarter on 03/15/2022, build a community and inspire not only guitarists, technicians and makers. Our intended goal with the campaign is to open source this as a market-ready guitar (version 2) and all of the IT components that we have developed for this purpose, provided that funding comes through the campaign. Thus many can participate in the development of the guitar.

The most exciting details of our SensGuitar:

1) An ultra-wide, full-color display incorporated into the fretboard of the guitar neck.
2) A touch display incorporated into the body of the guitar.
3) FPGA computer-based sound processing (including simulated effects devices).
4) Feedback from and novel interaction possibilities with the SensGuitar
5) Built-in mobile studio with 12 flexibly configurable audio inputs/outputs
6) Update capability via the internet and modular expandability/upgradability.

For a quick overview, check out our 1-minute teaser video:
[/url ]

Access to our Kickstarter campaign (planned launch on 03/15/2022) can be found here:
[/url https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sensgit/223273337?ref=9n3iev&token=1115e2ec]

A deeper insight into the ideas and concepts and the most important use cases can already be obtained via our website:
[/url https://sensguitar.com/]

Since we are planning to launch our Kickstarter campaign soon and are planning live streams about exciting topics and aspects of SensGuitar about every two days at 6pm (Berlin time zone) at Twitch, we think it would be a very good opportunity to exchange ideas with you here. Maybe you have more ideas for a next prototype?

We would be grateful for the exchange with you in one of our numerous live streams. The first stream will be available as follows:
- next week on Tuesday, 15.03.2022
- at 6pm (Berlin time zone) at Twitch
- will be available at [/url https://www.twitch.tv/sensgit]

We look forward to hearing from you and this community.

Many greetings

Marcus

[Haenk]

Who would ever use or buy or build that?

Looks like a way over-the-top solution to a problem that does not exist.

IMHO.

[Terry Bites]

Best keep it a secret then. Or buy some advertising space?

[Bassman59]

Well, just by the location of the pickup selector switch, I can tell that nobody who's ever played an electric guitar was involved in the design.

How does that fingerboard feel? That light-up thing looks to be very flat, and the frets are a mile high.

[Cerebus]

I have one question: Why?

I remember being young, with more enthusiasm than sense*, and so I shall try not to be too scathing, but it's going to be hard. I have been playing, and occasionally making, guitars for nearly 50 years. I can see nothing there that would have been of any interest to me at any point along that journey. Someone's just thrown a load of 'stuff' at a guitar just because they think it looks cool, without any thought about what it brings to the party, or of what it takes away.

And can somebody please get the beaver that hacked away at that wood to sharpen his teeth!



That is just disrespectful; a tree died for this. Moreover, any potential guitarist buyer is just going to laugh at a quality of finish like that. However, You might manage to sell a few to the sort of people who hang around with musicians, or "drummers" as we know them.

*That's the only excuse someone could have for this *ahem* innovation.

[xrunner]

Oh gosh ... 

Well I used to play guitars but it's been a long time ago. Just from an aesthetic viewpoint, I really don't think the display panel goes with the body style you have selected. It just looks like someone super-glued it on and it looks awful like that. If you wannna make a "futuristic" guitar like that, crammed full of modern electronics and a display on the side, I'd go with a completely new body design just for that. As it is IMHO the look is terrible, but you wanted to know our opinions ... 

[SiliconWizard]

Add in some Cloud stuff and AI. =)

[jonpaul]

Perhaps not innovative: Did you check existing trademarks, patents and other IP? Have you file or been granted a patent? If yes the patent number?

Ever see the Keith McMillan Instruments StrongArm sustainer?

Bon Chance,

Jon

[obiwanjacobi]

Creating something new for guitar players is very hard. As you can read, most players are very conventional and dislike anything that deviates from the norm. I will assume that this is prototype, build quick and cheap to get to a working version fast -which is a sound strategy IMO. I expect the actual guitar to be made of 'tone' wood and a better quality. The guitar should be a good guitar to start with or you have nothing to build upon.

That 'interactive' fretboard could be cool for students. I could see a guitar teacher owning one to let their students learn their way around the fretboard - like soloing in a specific key. However the construction doesn't look like it is very playable. The extra width could be nice for students, but hamper more advanced players. The frets (and the feel of them) are critical to have good playing experience. I could see also selling a model with a normal neck. I would suggest watching a couple of guitar luthier videos in order to get a feel on what things are important and why.

I am not a fan of built-in effects. I would rather the guitar would interface with my existing effects - I spent a lot of money getting those. The protocol to do that would be MIDI, I think. There are other guitars with built-in effects (like the Line6 Variax), but not many. I could totally see modern touch controller built-in that outputs (programable) MIDI messages to drive existing effect parameters. The placement of these controllers has to be ergonomic for the player to access them during playing the guitar.

I do agree with the 'over the top' sentiment of previous comments. I does look like the guitar tries to do everything different for no apparent reason. Perhaps, pick out some key aspects and build guitars with that first. Then you could later introduce a new model with extra or other features. That way you gain experience in what it takes to do this for real and can gauge the interest in you (cheaper) product.

My 2 cents.
Good luck

[Renate]

I dunno. I have an open mind, but that neck looks like a 2 x 4 (what we use in America to build wall supports).
I'm sure that any guitarist would pick it up, give a violent shudder and put it down.

I own a "Traveller" headless electric guitar. When I got it the head block was almost a semi-circle with sharp corners.
I immediately said, "That will not do". I torn it down and machined it to a rounded form.
I was surprised how nice the neck was. Still, the balance is awful. It's not my favorite.
The point is how picky guitarists are.

And jeez, for a promo video you couldn't hand somebody a piece of sandpaper and tell them, "make it look nice"?

[CaptDon]

For an 'effects guitar' I own a Casio MG510. First off, as a basic guitar it plays as well if not better than a Strat and that IS important. As a MIDI guitar there is a bit of lag on the lower notes of the lower strings as it takes a couple of vibrations of the string for the electronics to identify the pitch and amplitude then process that to a MIDI data signal. That means there is a bit of a learning curve to playing the MG510 in a working band. I can't really see any additional value to your guitar for a working musician. Was that some kind of a pedal board interface to the built in effects? It just looks like a giant novelty toy that is too complicated to be practical. My MG510 runs for several 4 hour gigs on one charge of the NIMH AA batteries. Don't know, but your unit looks power hungry. As for sales, well there are those people that always need the newest toy, practical or not. Audiophools spend thousands on cables 10 feet long and blind testing has shown 12 gauge NM to 'sound better' at about $1.00 per foot!!! Price your unit at $20K and there are a certain number of morons that will just have to have one!!! There are people with daily driver cars that cost or one million, maybe they are your target audience. I love PRS guitars, I've known Paul since the 70's, most of his guitars that I would like to own cost over $5000. Do I own one.......Nope, can't justify the cost as 'practical' and I am a paid professional working musician!!!

[Renate]

Besides, who wants to look at a display on a guitar?
And for me, I don't even want to look at the neck. I know it's there! (Or it should be, at least.)
If the display/controller is so critical it should be in front of the guitarist, but not in their face.
I keep a small display (just my cell phone) on the mic stand vertical as a memory aid/play list and my eyes are not glued to it.

[ratatax]

Guys you're a bit harsh on this project, finish can't be top notch it's a prototype.
I'm a bit more worried about the price, looking at the kickstarter it seems that the full guitar is about $8500 ? Also I don't really know why on your website you list all the parts of the guitar, who would buy like the FPGA board alone for $800 ?
I'd say just make 1 finished product. Open source doesn't really matter, it will probably lack community support unless you have thousands of buyers. Just don't bother with that and make a great product that will provide a great experience.
From a personal standpoint, I think the screen on the body is a great idea, but not so much on the neck, it's very gimmicky and could be just replaced with LEDs.

[Cerebus]

Guys you're a bit harsh on this project, finish can't be top notch it's a prototype.

Top notch is one thing, but "hasn't even see any sandpaper or a drop of varnish, in fact raw wood from the timber merchant looks smoother" is another.

It's far, far from as well finished as any piece of wood should be, even in an early prototype, and any reasonable person doing the work ought to know that. I can't help thinking that we've got a front row seat to a real car crash of a Kickstarter if we're seeing that much blindness to their own shortcomings this early in the whole thing. They are so caught up in "Ooo, shiny LCD fingerboard", "Ooo, shiny display!", "Ooo, fancy FPGAs!" that nobody thought "Hey, before we shoot the promo video should we perhaps clean up the actual guitar bit and make it look at least as good as a $50 Chinese cheapie?".

There's no excuse for execution that poor in a prototype that you're showing off to the world  and it would be a disservice to everybody to pretend it's anything other than what it is, which is a project that would have got me an "E-" in woodwork class at school. If you're planning to charge $8500 for a finished guitar you need to demonstrate from the start that you can at least handle the basic materials of guitar-making competently, and this does not demonstrate that. What we're seeing is a big sign that says "Does not have a clue how to work with wood, let alone make a guitar out of it.".

I'd wager that neither principal has made and sold a single guitar before. Would you buy a new design of high end electronics instrument (say a spectrum analyser) from someone who has never designed, built and sold even the most basic electronic instrument before? No, I thought not. This is no different, it's running before you can crawl, let alone walk. I tell you, it's going to end in tears.

[John B]

I very much wanted to be open minded, but it really does not seem like a tool aimed at a professional market. It seems more like a result of the guitar hero generation. No professional is going to be buying a tool that is also a beginners tutorial device with extraneous gimmicks. Having said I don't actually know what market you are aiming at.

Onboard DSP certainly has it's place on an instrument. The main things that would be useful would be digitised note information, like MIDI as a legacy option, but using more modern protocols like open sound control or similar. Extra control surfaces are also quite useful, sliders, infrared expression controls etc.

The other main area would be onboard impulse responses and probably amp simulations. The benefit of having onboard DSP is that you could have multiple pickups, and multiple types of pickups ie magnetic or piezo around the body of the guitar which are all fed into your impulse response engine, and given different weightings, positional parameters etc. This would be an advantage over external IR FX which are only supplied a mixed mono pickup signal.

While the visuals on a fingerboard might have artistic merit, it pretty much never works on actual performances and gets very gimmicky very quickly.

I'm starting to feel old. Apps on my guitar? No.......just......end me.

[John B]

I do hate to be negative about a project, because innovation is a good thing in the music world, especially when many instrument are largely unchanged over hundred of years. But from that you can infer that there is a quality to those instruments that is enduring.

I couldn't help but think of this though:

[Bud]

Do i need to have a Google account to login to the guitar to play ?

[MarcusGrum]

Dear community. 

Thank you very much for all your posts. It is a great pleasure to see your emotions about this first post, and we are very happy that you have looked at the material we have prepared. 

Please remember that SensGuitar is a prototype of a new kind of guitar. We don't want to upset or disrespect any guitar builders. If you have any feedback, please let us know - we're happy to learn from it and try to incorporate it into the next prototype version. 

Below we'll try to address your questions, provide more information on some of the posts, and share your great thoughts. 

Regarding the wood: since we are beginners in CNC milling, we decided to make the prototype from a cheap and soft pine wood. It is only for the prototype and the final products need to consider traditional guitar wood, of course. We designed a completely new guitar body and a completely new guitar neck, so there are two new kinds of displays integrated smoothly into the guitar. 

As for the finish, it was not ready at the time of video recording. In the meantime, we added a natural colorless finish so that the guitar looks similar to the one in the video. You'll be able to see the current finish during the kickstarter live sessions on Wednesday, March 15 on Twitch, 6pm (Berlin time) at https://www.twitch.tv/sensgit. 

As for your question about how the fretboard feels. It's hard to describe in a text. We put cover glass on the display, which is made by us so the steel strings don't hurt the neck display. Thus, it feels like a glass guitar neck.  The frets are metal parts that were first CNC-milled and then polished so that they feel soft and comfortable. So far, the frets are not as round as we want them to be. We're still working on that. 

As for trademarks and patents, we checked. To the best of our knowledge, there is no patent. We thought about applying for patents, but we decided to put it under an open-source license so that the community of makers and technicians can participate. 

As for the idea of optionally putting a normal, non-displayable neck on the guitar. We have a CNC prototype for that, but we've been focusing on new types of devices to show the feasibility. In fact, the SensGuitar is designed to be expandable, meaning that manufacturers can start with a small, inexpensive initial setup (e.g., just the body display with traditional pickup setting) and expand it later with additional modules (e.g., the neck display and digital audio processing incl. FPGA). 

As for the power supply. You are right about that. Right now, it takes two usb-c-pd based power supplies, which is a lot from our point of view. Meanwhile, we need 80 watts at the highest load. For the prototype, that's fine. We are currently optimizing a special PCB to run the board with only one power cable. We also want to be able to connect it to batteries.   

We hope we have considered all your ideas and comments. If not, or if you have any further questions, please let us know. 

On a side note, the idea of putting Doom on the body display is really funny. Since we think the source code of Doom can be found on Github and it is open-source, we will try to consider this application idea after the Kickstarter campaign.

Thanks again for all your contributions. 

We look forward to hearing from you.

[pardo-bsso]

I'm not sure if the patent still applies where you live but Fretlight had some that resemble your guitar.

[CaptDon]

From the standpoint of a working guitarist I feel it is more of a gimmicky toy for techies to play with. As one poster stated it is a mere step sideways from Guitar Hero with a beefy price tag. My MG510 has value because as a basic guitar it plays well and feels good. The neck has all the right curves. Your neck is not what I would look for in a nice easy to play instrument. I am however very finicky, so much so that I have a 'compensated nut' on my guitar so the open chords at the low frets are as pleasing as the Barr chords at the high frets. Intonation adjustments alone can't fix that problem with an uncompensated nut. If your guitar isn't pleasing as a basic guitar all the frills add zero value to something that doesn't have a good tone or feel. You need to bring in some real luthiers to your project. Next, as for effects, again with my MG510's MIDI data output the choice of voice modules is endless and basically I could sell my Yamaha MU-80 module for exactly what I paid for it and try something else. My old Yamaha FB-01 is worth more today than what I paid for it, your FPGA modules probably won't be. I will probably never look at a guitar body based display while playing so that adds nothing. I do however look at my little 'floor rack' which has a DigiTech GSP-5 effector, a Korg DTR-2 rack tuner with mute, a Yamaha MU-80 voice generator (which also has built in switchable effects) and finally an Audio Technica wireless receiver. I have considered buying one of the new 'vocoder' pedals and stop using my teeth chattering Heil talk-box. Best of luck in your endeavor, but I doubt I'll be buying one anytime soon.
 

[Bassman59]

As for your question about how the fretboard feels. It's hard to describe in a text. We put cover glass on the display, which is made by us so the steel strings don't hurt the neck display. Thus, it feels like a glass guitar neck.  The frets are metal parts that were first CNC-milled and then polished so that they feel soft and comfortable. So far, the frets are not as round as we want them to be. We're still working on that. 

The neck is the guitar's user interface. Get that wrong and nobody cares about the rest of the instrument. This is why the part of the electric guitar that has changed the least in the nearly hundred year history of the instrument is the neck. Certainly there are variations in thickness, width and contour, but the basic design remains unchanged. Why? Look at the human hand.

Why are you CNC milling frets? Buy fret wire by the mile from Stewart-McDonald. Hell, they even have jigs and tools you can use to measure the precise location of the frets as well as the saws needed to cut the slots in the fingerboard. The size of frets has basically standardized because of the combination of how the human plays the instrument and the positions needed for intonation.

What is the target market for these things? If it's for beginners to learn (what with the light-up fingerboard) then it needs to cost $85, not $8500.

And there's really no benefit to complicated on-board electronics when you can run the cable to a pedalboard at your feet and get any sound you want. There's a reason why the Roland Guitar Synthesizer, a remarkable instrument for its time, never took off. Seriously -- look at the history of electronics built into guitars. Sure, the Gibson ES-355 has all of the tone controls, but most of that was never used, and it's why you don't see that configuration on most other guitars.

I would wish you good luck, but you'll need more than luck to convince anyone to buy your attempt at an instrument.

[Renate]

Regarding the wood: since we are beginners in CNC milling, we decided to make the prototype from a cheap and soft pine wood.

I dunno. As hackers we all have some tolerance for, "Yeah, this part falls off, but in the final version it will be better."
The quoted sentence could have been, "We were going to make this out of 303 stainless, but since we're not experienced machinists we started with aluminum."
Seriously, pine is pretty pitiful. You could have used Corian (that countertop material) or marble and made something that would look good in a video at least (but would be horrible in real life).
Or Delrin. Or HDPE. Or Nylon. Or purple heart. Or maple. Or...

Disclaimer: I'd just like to make it clear that although I've played guitar for MANY years I'm still a crappy player.

[SiliconWizard]

All this is nice, but this is frankly just too many gadgets, the fretboard is likely to be both fragile and uncomfortable, and likely to produce all kinds of parasitic noise too.

And, at this price point, you can get one of the finest instruments out there already, with top-notch craftsmanship and materials. Sorry to rain on your parade, but apart from maybe a few geeks with too much cash in the bank, I doubt it would sell.

[Renate]

I'd just like to say that we're all not meanies.

If somebody came in here and said, "I wanted to build a custom guitar with a satellite dish on it, just for myself",
we'd say, "Respect, you rock!"

If somebody comes in here saying, "My company is going to rule the world with <strange concept that nobody is interested in>",
we'd say, "I don't think that anybody will be interested in it."