it's crazy to see styro in this channel, and it's a relief that styro is still alive

i would suggest to make a first prototype like a proof of concept with only 1 string (like a shovel guitar), so you can work around that and determine if its viable o too expensive and complicate to acomplish

So.. this is weird but there was a kid I met when I was in High School who had a patent on a guitar that used fiberoptic cables. Essentially you can detect the contact of the fingers against the cable to determine the position of the fingers on the frets etc. It actually worked very well and was impressive given his age of like 15-16.

So hyped to see the finished thing, regardless of how well it works

Oh god it's Styropyro

Two of my favorite KZfaq creators!

You need to find an LDM (Laser Distance Measuring device) that has continuous measuring (preferably fast refreshing one so it can keep up with pitch bends) and for fun of course visible beams. the old one I have has a nice visible red beam. In a brief quick search of "continuous laser measure" it looks like you have several options so find out which ones have visible beams and then order one of each of those so you can test at home which one will work best. Hopefully you find one that you can also usb connect to its board, then all you have to do is have your computer read the continuous measurements and convert the distances to audible pitch. For example readings within 14.4"- 15.01" can be a C. For a bit of pitch bend control you can also add in a gradient pitch change for a few mm's of where the frets are or of course you could go full on portamento like a Theremin but that would be like playing a fretless so if you cant play fretless chords in tune id pass on dong that. You can also add a whammy bar by rigging the LDM's so they are on a track that you can slide to increase and decrease their distance reading. If accessing their readings via usb however you may need to set up a camera just looking at their screens to read off their measurements and put them though pitch processing but that would be a nightmare so I hope you have a good tech friend who will help you get the readings from the LDM's directly to the computer. Once its working it should be reasonably practical to have the data into midi as well.

I love both of these creators! This is awesome

this is so cool, such a comprehensive discussion, all my thoughts were adressed

this will be sick. excited to be updated

Really excited to see how/if this pans out! The bit about analog brightness measurement made me think you could use the lasers to control 6 discrete analog synthesizers with the pitch determined by the brightness. I don't know enough about any of this to say what you'd have to do to "tune" it so that the frets correspond to the notes that would be on a guitar (I imagine there's some algebraic formula that would work but I don't know math like that), but you might be able to end up with some sort of "fretless" guitar sort of situation along those lines, with smooth gliding between notes. I'm not an engineer or physicist or anything, but I figured tossing it out there won't hurt!

My biggest takeaway from this video is that in the US Lasers are food

Laser colour based on the little rings at the bottom of the strings (ball ends?), so if I remember rightly: bronze, red, black, green, purple and silver. Black's got to be the easiest laser to make, but the most susceptable to interferance from other light sources. For bronze and silver lasers, you probably need to tame some kind of space dragon. --- One way to do volume could be to have 2-3 beams for each string and detect the sensor seeing all of them and (all of them) minus 2 to determine how quickly the note was hit - this way you can still use on/off sensors, you just have a simple program to subtract T1 from T2. --- I think it is a good idea to have one set for the right hand and another for the left. There can be a small barrier at the end of the neck. In terms of space, can't all of the bulk of the emitters and sensors be hidden on the back of the guitar and just diverted to the front? --- As someone who knows nothing about any of this, it seems like an easy problem to see how it can work, but a very difficult problem to know which lasers to buy, how to connect them, which safety equipment to trust and so on... yet I feel like styropyro knows all of that stuff and still thinks it sounds hard, which is a little worrying. X)

unexpected collab! i like the laser guitar idea!

combine lasers with gatling guitar for gatling laser guitar bonus: use to cover big iron

This reminded me of some videos i saw a while back of a laser harp being played, the channel i saw is Theremin Hero and i think it could give you some ideas for this project :D

If this works out it will be one insane project :)

It's probably because I've been watching weird drum and cymbal videos as of late, but it would be funny to see the wacky ideas you can come up for those things.

is it weird I was already subbed to both of these

"Off the record I guess I could just film in my garage and be like 'I'm in China right now'" lmao

Nice

I also thought with the multiple light sensors per string (be it LDR or photo diodes) idea, it would be nice to add a diffusion strip in front of them this way if you block it, the reflection would go over multiple sensors and you could interpolate where the peak is between them (giving you position between the sensors instead of limiting it to a specific sensor) I bet you could just use lagrange polynomial interpolation or smthn and then it's not hard to find the peak.

@5:40 Right hand could control built in effects pedals? Maybe a DIY loop pedal and drum machine are built in as well? All in one party guitar, lasers, sound, drums, et cetera et cetera

I know people in sweeden that has several laser engravers and fiber lasers. I think youre fine if your making a laser guitar.

My suggestion, first make a small laser harp, simple on off control to synthesizer, from there buttons on the neck or laser distance measuring, analog industrial distance lasers might be an easy start.

He did it!

1 : how to make lasers calculate distance 2 :how to extract the calculation, 3 : how to assign frequency values to distance measured 4 : how to convert that to audio signal

mattias, filming a video and putting it online and saying "off the record... can I?" doesn't really work that way xD

Exciting the strings with pulsing lasers could be neat too but it would be really hard to play

Just by seeing styro on the thumb, I can certify Mattias is in trouble, big trouble. The trouble is likely a giant cannon of light that can, both, sound crazy good and blind you in a fraction of a second.

Maybe it is easier to ignore the whole optical part and just use capacitive touch sensors on the fret board which detect where you place your fingers. The lasers would then be just used for plucking.

Basically can't you do this pretty easily by reverse engineering some laser measurers? Just have a program that plays a certain note when the laser measures a certain distance, then take apart 12 of them and arrange them so that you've got lasers for the strumming and fretting hands. When actually playing the guitar it might be easier to not have a strumming hand at all tho, it might be easier to just use one or both hands for fretting, since you dont actually need to strum a laser, so maybe just 6 measurers. Then of course you could probably modify the laser on the measurer to make it a visible laser, maybe. idk what I'm talking about but it sounds like a simple way to do this, using something that already exists.

Get a clear, fiber, optic cable, like fair light, and how the laser travel down it to a sensor. Plucking the cable then change how the laser comes out which thing can be measured

Styropyro is such a silly big guy

What if you coupled the laser into a naked largish diameter optical fiber and put a phosphor on the surface? It would be a glowing string, it would give you tactile feedback, and I think by bending it and plucking it you could get "where is the finger" and "how loud a sound to make" signals in the transmission of the light from one end of the fiber to the other.

lasers from both sides

you’re gonna have lasers at the head go towards the neck. Where they will be reflected up by 45° mirror into a mirror that spinning. As the mirror spins, it sweeps laser over the hole of the neck. As the laser is sweeping over the neck, the angle at which it’s coming in becomes less steep. So, then you can create light corridors that match the steepness of laser at that point. To cut down on interference. You could even attain further precision by pulsing the lasers. By pulsing lasers or putting a clear to black covering. Then use relative rightness to determine where the lasers being blocked. Then below where the neck connects to the body you can have 45° half transparent mirror, reflecting light down into sensors. And then just have lasers coming. Then have lasers at the bridge pointed towards these mirrors to handle the strumming.

An easy workaround for the lasers being hard to see on camera could be using a fog machine.

You could have 2 lasers per string going in opposite directions and have the sensor part be in the middle

Hey Mattias, I think it would be a lot easier, at least as a back up plan, to use some sort of capacitive touch buttons that detect your fingers touching the frets, and then the lasers more for show, and not so much as the primary way of getting the notes. The picking hand is easier to do with lasers as you can have a sensor that detects when you block the light, but for the frets having the neck detect your fingers instead of light sounds like a way simpler idea.

What about 6 different colors, each fret is a series of fiber optics. That lead to a photo sensor. And you can line it up in front of the sensor and determine frets by the color that's scattered in which area.

Analog signal processing is not super hard on arduino board. Even if the curve is not linear, you could check each fret individually and write down the analog value and then do if-else comparisons to play notes. To avoid miss readings, you could multiplex the signals at high rate by turning one laser on and read the value and then turn it off and turn the next one on and read the value etc. The lasers can be read individually so fast it looks like they are all on at the same time.

Dare you to try to make the frets work using TDR

i would do jsut one set of lasers and then have pressure sensors for the fret board

Get two sets of six lasers with a two sets being different colors have them point at each other. Have detectors right below the neck to pick up the bottom lasers from being plucked or covered. Then the lasers on the head reflect onto a spinning mirror that sweeps the lasers over the neck of the guitar. You then put a box around the spinning mirror with a little window to limit how far the laser sweeps out. Then create six cells between the frets that funnels the light into the a sensor and separates the sensor from the other lasers. On the surface of the frets have a gradient that goes from clear to black . That way by measuring the brightness levels, you can find fingers horizontal position. Finally, you can get a bunch of cheap plastic fiber optic cable, like the kind you see in fairy lights. Give them a black coating on the outside. Then line them up into flat layers. Cut some of the flat layers in half. These flat layers then can be used as wedges to increase the angle to make sure the fiber optic cable is lined up with the angle. The laser is coming at them. The point of the fiber optic cable is to minimize the amount of laser light bleeding in from other lasers. Note since the fiber optic cable will have some travel, you’ll have to offset the sensors form frets

I feel if youre doing this you should make it a way that the lasers actually have some sort of function. For instance with the camera vision idea then that would work without the lasers as well, so whats the point? Then the lasers are just for show

like you said we will do double laser beams on each string, and how about making the neck see-through

Idea: each theat is a sensor and each "string" is a different colour s soo picking would deflect the laser and the sensor could detect different wavelengths ?

You know, this laser guitar sounds a _lot_ like some Animusic stuff... so just for the future, have you ever considered trying to make some other Animusic instruments? Resonant Chamber might be absolutely amazing to try and pull off!

Regarding the safety goggles, as multi-colored lasers were suggested remember this requires you to filter different wavelengths. I'm not an expert on this so I wonder if it is possible to have 6 different lasers with narrow enough frequencies and also to fabricate a goggle with 6 different filtering layers that are exactly for those frequencies, so the lasers are dimmed without the goggles being completely black?

styropyro is the goat

I saw a video of someone succesfully doing it wiith an arduino and midi controller

Just an idea. What if the fretboard had the lasers but the pick hand actually had 6 short strings with some kind of sensors to detect when they are picked? I feel like that would be easier to play and the logistics might be easier than 2 separate sets of lasers for picking and fretting

Styropyro is a silly guy

Laser ukulele? Smaller to start with.

Simple, make it fretless

I think a laser harp would be way easier to make than a guitar.

I think he overestimates how hard this will be. If you're like me outsource the coding to fiver or chat gpt or something. I think the hard part will be packing the lasers tight enough together.

En avståndsmätare finns kanska små och där får du ju ett digitalt värde du kanske kan konventera till toner 🤷‍♂️ finns i typ bygghandel

Laser ukulele would also be cool, and it has 4 strings and many fewer frets.

This is a terrible idea! Using burning lasers for feedback? If no one gets hurt i will go buy a lottery ticket

first

unsubbing because you're pushing betterhelp and there is plenty of information out there on why they are a shady company that hurts people. you either didn't do that research, or you don't care. either is unacceptable. goodbye.