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here's an idea: -don't use spot lasers, use lasers which generate a line. usually a laser into some sort of prism -align the lines as if they are the strings, with the very end of the line terminating at the top of the neck. In this config the laser pointer would likely be pointing into the cavity. -along the fret board you place light sensitive diodes, pointing towards the laser, for the specific wavelength of the laser chosen. -when nothing is touched or attempted to be played every single diode along the fretboard would "see" the laser, if you attempted to play a note, it would break the line and only some of the diodes would see the line. Now you have the desired note. -when ALL the diodes are broken simultaneously, you are strumming. probably has come caveats which need dealing with but this is what i would do to try and eliminate the over complexity. should work for different colours/multi colours, no stupidly complicated narrow section time of flight measurements, uses lasers still and would look sick with some smoke. if you like the idea, drop me a message and i could probably help with the electronics.

This sounds like a fun idea, but the execution seems sooo difficult! Wish you luck!

We have been here before thinking "Matthias is never gonna make this work, it's impossible" and then he actually does make it work, so I think we should all have faith that in a few months we will have a laser guitar video

You'll need 12 "lasers" and may need to employ reflective finger covers. 6 beams originating at the headstock to measure the distance to fret for the note played, and 6 beams originating at the bridge to detect right-hand action. You might want to be looking at the type of beams used in security applications (usually infrared) or those that control doorbells, line-break detection, and others in that vein that have already been designed for, and used for decades, in pretty much the application you want (you're just wanting to miniaturize further.)

I think that you could hide your optics inside the guitar and use a prism where the bridge would be. Then, another prism around where the neck pickup would go, which sends beams up the neck. If you use six different frequencies, it should be possible to use one sensor to measure all the distances to reflective interruptions on the neck. Think laser range finder. That could also be done through the prism. The lasers that detected strumming would have a reader that measured the occultation speed and effect the attack or volume of the note. Oh, I assume that the string/distance lasers have a momentary off pulse that's used to time the round trip.

Each laser has to be a unique wavelength. Then have a time of flight sensor for each laser with a notch filter that passes just the wavelength of the laser it's sensing. The time of flight sensors can determine the distance for each laser based on how long it takes for a reflection to come back. The notch filters ensure each laser+sensor pair doesn't interfere with the others.

I'm so glad you're working with styropyro best collab on KZfaq

Laser state alone won't allow for much in the way of guitar dynamics, and it'll play like a child's electronic keyboard. Adding a capacitive panel along the fretboard would let you combine the laser break state with pressure, string bend, and finger location, but will complicate the software a fair bit. The left hand/right hand also need separate states. A prism and mirror arrangement emitting up and down the guitar from where the pickup goes would work, but will slightly interrupt the design goal of a single unbroken laser string. Covering that emitter with a small LED panel could look cool though, and would serve as effective visual masking in the dark and foggy environment this guitar deserves. Lots of design challenges in this one, but it's gonna be _ridiculously_ awesome to see it in action.

6 lasers from the body towards the neck and 6 more lasers from the neck towards the body sounds like the best configuration to me

You will probably have a problem with hitting the other strings with your left hand, so a wider string spacing would work better, maybe a bass would work better.

There's a little guitar toy, called an air guitar by vtech, it comes in two sections one for strumming the other for fretting, but the cool thing is you get two choose between I think 3 pitches based on how near you have them to each other most likely it's infrared not a laser though but sort of similar idea. For this I'd suggest having reflective gloves for the fretting so that it could detect the Lazer being reflected back and maybe detect the distance based on how strong it is

Right on time!

Mount 2 sets of lasers at the end of the fretboard (not the bridge or headstock). Point one set down the neck towards the nut. Point the other set towards the bridge. Now you have two sets of 6 "strings" and a slight break that's in a place you normally won't be playing regardless. This would effectively isolate the pitch lasers from the strumming lasers.

2 of my faves in one thing, i LOVE it Always love all these projects!!

This is 100% possible with some sort of laser range finder such as the ones in phones, and if they are to large you could simply put them inside the body of the guitar and have your bridge as a reflector to keep it compact. The issue with picking and fretting could be solved by having it be distance based so that the further end of the laser (fretboard) would adjust tone and the closer side of the laser would play the the sound, only issue is if you fret and strum simultaneously before it can register the fret

You can have two independent sets of 6 lasers. A short one for the picking and a long one for fretting on fretboard. They don't even have to be lined up, So you can go with a even more futuristic design, like for example Synthaxe (80's synth guitar).

This truly says that, *you are indeed an engineer.*

You could try adding photosensors into frets or the fretboard to pick up the diffuse scattered light from your fretting hand. With wavelength filtering and calibrated sensitivity it should work. Maybe a laser ukulele would be easier to prototype because it has a shorter scale and fewer frets.

You should put lasers on both ends. The distance from the headstock would determine the pitch and the lasers from the bridge would determine the picking. Extra points for making pinch harmonics work.

I would use 12 lasers. 6 from the body of the guitar pointing down onto the neck, and 6 lasers pointing down from the neck into the body of the guitar. the body lasers don't need to have any position detection, just that you detect when you break the beam. These control the strum hand only. The lasers from the neck would measure how far away you break the beam. You could wear a glove with a reflective surface, and by timing how long the reflection takes, you will know how far away you are on the fretboard. A microcomputer can then calculate and play the sound accordingly. If you use the 6 body lasers, and measure how much time is in between each laser, you can also calculate how fast you strum.

A completely different take would be for each "string" to be a strip of acrylic lighted from within and figure out a way to detect touches with reflected light. That might be a better way to get analog signals without blocking last beams and risking people's eyeballs.

The crossover we didn't know we wanted.

Cant wait for this

to eliminate the issue of not being able to strum without blocking the lasers, you could have the lasers just behind the last fret instead of at the bridge and have a strumming area where the sound hole/pickups on a regular guitar would be

Yellow lazers are also really pretty, aren’t they harder to find though…? I think… 🏴‍☠️ this project seems really intriguing and I can’t wait to see what you come up with!

Blue lasers to me are absolutely the "kid bought a high powered laser and is unsafe with it" laser lol. They're the cheapest type of diode to get in higher powers. Green lasers would get you the brightest beam for the lowest/safest power.

I just think range finders from weapon scopes, or i think carpentry tools use lasers to determine the size of rooms. Maybe that tech could be utilized somehow. very cool idea

I had an idea a few years ago for a cheap laser rangefinding system. Basically you have two colours of laser slightly misaligned, and a camera that can see how far apart the dots are. Say you have a red laser on the left, and a green laser on the right, but instead of being parallel, the green laser is angled slightly in toward the red, subtly, like a few degrees, such that 500mm or so away the dots overlap completely. If something breaks the beam closer than that, the green dot will be on the right, if something breaks the beam farther away, the green dot will be on the left, and with some simple trigonometry, you can calculate just where the obstruction is in the beam based on the distance between the dots. You _may_ have to wear clean white gloves to play this... So in this case, the neck would have a laser pair for each string, and a Raspberry Pi camera or similar seeing where the dots are. Now, because you'd be obstructing the beam on the neck for fretting, and you also need to do it over the body for strumming/picking, you need to duplicate this. Either have another set firing in the same direction from the bridge, or put them back to back firing opposite directions (my preference, so you have zero chance of an escaped dot messing with the readings). Just adding to this, stream of consciousness style, making each string out of two beams _might_ provide you with a way to see the direction of a pick based on the order the beams are broken in. I'm not sure of the utility of this, or how much complexity it'd add to the code, but if that seems of value, I think it should be possible.

This sounds awesome! I wouldn't have the first idea of how to go about it though.

When going to a concert with eye protection

I knew a friend who worked on Cali for the laseriam. He told me the way he first made an electric laser harp was along the method of senors along lasers. You’d need a guitar neck built like a human spin full of sensors or some kind of pre programming to help dampen the chaos.

Congrats on the Bambu Labs printer. There are some upgrades if you're up for a few game changers.

you can make the lasers for strumming point up from the pickup place and just make them controll volume. Like a theremin.

Six lasers on the bottom for the strumming hand, and six lasers on the top for the fretting hand and where the front board ends, you need to have a piece of plywood there set the lasers don’t interact with each other

This sounds very good, try it please!

My idea would be for the lasers on the neck to be entirely useless and just to look cool, with the actual playing being like an omatone.

good idea, probably much easier than the rotating guitar neck project. lots of software and coding involved with this one, i'm sure.

For a picking hand, you can add a dividing mirror before the neck starts. That mirror would redirect beams to the body inside, where a sensor would be placed to determine it the note should be played or not

More complex laser harps use what are essentially laser rangefinders so they can tell where the beam is broken. Maybe you could use a pair of lasers for each "string"? One on each end of the guitar, so you could have a laser for picking and another for fretting. Then you could program the controllers or whatever you will be using to ignore any values beyond a certain range. That way it wouldn't matter if you broke the strumming beam while fretting or vice versa.

Perhaps you could have some sort of string over just the body to detect which strings are being plucked. Also perhaps a pitch bending wheel, volume wheel, or modulating wheel would help to give it a more dynamic sound. Regardless, I am excited to see where this goes!

Be aware! Don't mess up with the laser communiti! They're has the lasers and stuff.

I think you'd still need 6 small strings in the picking area for ergonomic reasons and to make sure the neck beam aren't disturbed

count me in!

Guitar idea: every fret has its own pickup.

Cool

Fiber optic strings ... optical clear, BUT very squishy material (think silicone rubber or similar). Now you can maybe see the laser light. and perhaps get some dynamics by manipulating the fibers ?

I tbibk best way might be to have the frets have sensors in the neck to know where your fingers are pressing down and then just have lasers tell which string you are playing

What will produce the sound? are you gonna just have a speaker? really excited for this project btw

LOL I came for the silly, hairbrained idea, but I stayed for the “Laser harps are LAME.”

Here’s a wacky idea that might not work: make each string a mini interferometer. The beam is emitted and split: half goes over where you strum, and half is redirected. The beams recombine at the fretboard and the total beam passes your fingers. Due to interference, the phase will shift when you strum (block one of the beam halves), and this can be tied to the volume, while the total path length determines the pitch.

You could have the sensors read a short distance as a pluck event and a longer distance as a fret event and the pluck events just play whatever the last fret event value was, maybe velocity could be tied to how long the pluck event interruption lasts. If it's short it's loud and if it's long it's quiet. Maybe the fretboard could also have a pressure sensor where your left hand can press harder or more lightly into the fingerboard for velocity, or maybe even a volume swelling effect without plucks

I want to see a guitar neck that lights up with the scale of the notes in the chord you just played. It should keep that scale lit until you play the next chord. It should do majors and minors and variations of chords. It could have a setting for blues or country or rock

Instead of trying to measure the distance at which the laser beam is broken, maybe you could just use simple light sensors in the frets that detect your finger lighting up from crossing the beam.

cheat with capacitive touch sensors up the fretboard, then shoot two lasers per string, one tripwire type to detect picking when interrupted, a block of wood or steel or whatever to conceal the second diode that shoots up into your finger to make it look like the laser is doing the theremin stuff, if you could get them lined up well enough they'd look like one beam shooting through the "or something". like its not exactly what you were talking about but is relatively easily doable.

Real

If you put infrared laser It'll be an invisible guitar, can be pretty cool

Still better than a telecaster lol

Maybe put an array of laser down by the hole and then one array up at the head. Where the body amd the neck meet you put the light sensors in both directions to detect fingers. Then you need some way to calculate the length, maybe by sending them on puleses and count number of pulses missing or something like that.

How about 2 sets of lasers. One on the top of the neck to determin the pitch and one at the bottom that reacts to your playing hand and plays a note if you touch it, depending on the first laser set at the top. If good constructet it will look like one continious laser beam.

maybe you could wear special gloves that reflect the lasers down into the fretboard, and you detect them down there underneath the surface. for pitch

Maby you could use the laserfocus from a phone or camera to measure distance or a laser ruler. And only use the colored lasers for aesthetics.

yale physics laser guitar 😔

Lidar, which stands for Light Detection and Ranging try use this but with the visible spectrom

Also CD players use blue lazers, maybe dismantling them for the Lazer will be cheaper and easier.

up front, absolutely no clue about the physics of lasers so someone feel free to tell me this is stupid lol, but my first thought was something like mini glass prisms in place of frets with sensors imbedded in the neck under them, which would allow the laser to travel through the prisms down the whole length of the neck, only stopping when a finger breaks the beam and prevents it from reaching the next prism/sensor

Do a blue to purple spectrum for the strings.

So Jean-Michel Jarre's laser harp but as a guitar? I'd say make it, start a company and start producing and selling laser guitars

Surely the whole point of a harp is each string has a fixed tone like a piano otherwise it would be a fretted instrument.

U know thise glass bulbs with plasma in them, that moves to where u put ur finger and kinda makes noise. U should make a guitar out of that. Get long glass tubes with plasma and have each one a "string". Maybe u can get that to play???

I have no idea how they work or if they're sensitive enough to do it but maybe it would work with that laser measurement tools people use at construction sites. If they would work you could tak the measured distance and according to it play a note. Don't know how strumming would work on that tho.

Jean Michelle Krantz

I like the laser harps and think they are great for live performances. I don't see how a guitar form could work without being boring to watch and listen to. You need a fog machine to make low power lasers visible. Fingering notes without strings would be closer to playing air guitar than the real thing. A real guitar with lasers just for illumination has been kind of done. Have you played with the luminescent wire? It comes in different sizes and colors. A guitar strung up with luminescent wires would play more normal and would be highly visible even without fog or smoke.

I don't think the picking messing with the laser is an issue. Assuming you get the distance detection to work, all you need to to in terms of programming logic is to remember the last position your laser was at (i.e. which note would play) and as soon as you pick the laser (i.e. the laser position moves off the frets) you play the note corresponding of the previous laser position.

Oh, I thought you would use different color for each string xd

Have you tried lidar? Or what about time of flight sensors or ultrasonic sensors for a faux laser guitar? Hmmm you might need a separate input for plucks. You might also encounter some issues like sensors accidentally reading the distance of the wrong fingers so you might have to space 'strings' further apart and alter playing style.

Hii mattias would you use 2 sets of lasers? one starting from the end of the guitar frets(ones near the sound hole) so as to determine the finger position on frets and one one starting from bridge and extending till the start of the neck for detecting the pick movements?

what i'm thinking is just: if lasers are that different from regular strings in terms of dynamics, does it still make sense to keep the guitar shape? wouldn't it be better to invent a whole new instrument?

You can probably achieve the same thing, that is, a stringless guitar, with just a touch sensitive fretboard.

It's going to be awkward. Detecting the break in the beam is easy. Determining the *position* of the break is going to be HARD. With four fingers crowded together, I can't see any way of making "time of flight" detectors work with sufficient narrow detection corridors to pick out fingerposition on just one string at a time..

what about having a different picking mechanism and the lasers mounted before the fretboard

Maybe use distance sensors and a laser for visual presentation. It is kind of cheating but it looks cool and works

Hmmmmm ... how would you do pull offs? How would you do bends?

Wait the ol Pyro watches you?

How about a time of flight distance sensor - adafruit sells several

What if you make it so that the lasers aren’t constantly on? Like the laser shoots only when you touch the fingerboard?

Im not sure if thats better or worse than the aeroguitar

Did you ever finish the spark piano?

What about lidar? That could work in theory..

Did you get the idea about asking styropyro from me ?

Why dont you change the color of the laser depending on the pitch the guitar should play

laser distance sensors?

Couldn't you just strap 6 laser distance meters electronics to the body?

So are you going to use a camera with an AI to read which strings are you actually playing and how?

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Bro you haven't even finished your rotating guitar lol

be lazy. just use 6 laser range finders and sniff the data to use with arduino and basic math...

talk to guitarplayers before investing your money into a "dead project".........if you have high income do it.......