Eat this, RockBand: Misa digital touchscreen guitar-synth hybrid thing

Weird new technology and music – two great tastes that taste great together? Well, depends on your personal sense of aesthetics, I guess, but I’m always interested to see what people are doing to take music in new directions, and lone developers and hardware hackers are emerging as the cutting edge for innovation in the field.

Here’s a prime example: the MISA digital guitar. You can read about it on the developer’s homepage, but this brief video should be enough to convince the guitar freaks among you that you could do some pretty wild stuff with it:

What’s more, the guy’s making the MISA software free and open-source, with an open invitation to hack, expand and improve it… though if it ever got popular, you’d inevitably find guitarist forums full of people arguing over the most suitable Linux distro to build it around. Guitar geeks are just like computer geeks, really.

Someone buy me one, please? [via SlashDot]

2 thoughts on “Eat this, RockBand: Misa digital touchscreen guitar-synth hybrid thing”

  1. Apart from open sourcing software, I’m wholly unimpressed by this instrument. As you can see in the video, the neck is way, way too thick and too wide for playability, and the strings totally unwieldy. I can only assume that the designer is more of an engineer than a musician.

    If you want exciting new instrument news, Korg has released an updated version of the wavedrum ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1RUBRQBFWk ). Or you could just wait for this years’ installment of namm oddities ( http://www.otheroom.com/namm/ )

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