idea

I've been kicking around an idea for about 12 years. Imagine that you have a keyboard like below.


You will notice that it's only a section of a piano. But it's really a MIDI controller. MIDI is a way of creating electronic music. For instance, if you have a piano with a really neat guitar sound, the guitar has been recorded and you are generating the sound with a piano with MIDI. What all can MIDI do? For me it does two important things. It plays musical notes and it can pitch bend. Now instead of a guitar it's a pedal steel guitar.

Here's the theory. Each key matches up with a string on a steel guitar. You also have a potentiometer that can set where your "bar" is sitting on the guitar. For example, if the potentiometer is sitting at position 3 and you press button 8, then you get a G note.

If you get it all hooked up together then you have a basic lap steel guitar. It becomes a pedal steel with additional buttons that you can attach really anywhere on the body of your new instrument.

The tricky part is the electronics (at least for me). You need to hook up the keypad and the buttons to a controller, the controller would connect to a computer and it would process all the buttons and keys to determine what notes should be played. That's the easy part because I are a computer programmer. Then you run the MIDI into the Wavelore Instruments and bingo... an electronic pedal steel guitar. No more tuning, broken strings, wishing you had that killer knee-lever that Paul Franklin has (it's all electronic, you can change knee-levers and pedals during the middle of a song if you want).

So to recap. I need an Arduino or something similar, a smattering of keys and switches, some electronics knowledge, a computer (laptop if you want to take the new guitar out of the house), and the Wavelore/Kontakt Software (way too expensive for me currently). However if I could get the cheap stuff, then I could play around with it to get individual notes even if they don't sound like a PSG. Then when I got all the kinks ironed out, I buy the expensive software.

Technology has come a long way in the last 10 years and I think I could realize my dream with a little money, time, and knowledge. That last one is the trickiest.

nc