Ghost Guitar Plays Hendrix

Purple Haze all in my brain,
lately guitars they don’t seem the same,
[Josh] is playin’ funny but I don’t know why
‘scuse me while he electrifies.

[Josh] wanted to experiment with playing a guitar by different means. We’ve seen a few guitar hacks that use servos to play, and Arduino-based guitars that replace the strings with membrane potentiometers, but he decided to try a different approach. He’s using a permanent magnet and the electromagnetic effect to play the string.

Purple Haze all around,
all those amps are runnin’ up or down.
Are my strings all goin’ left or right?
Whatever it is, electromagnetism is pushin’ me outta sight.

To do this, he put a large permanent magnet next to the string and ran an alternating current through the string itself. When the current and the magnetic field interact, the string is pushed, like the bearing of a motor.  When the current goes the other way, the string is pushed in the opposite direction. Because he is using an alternating current (driven through a MOSFET tied into a frequency generator), he was able to control the frequency of this, and find the frequencies that made the string resonate, including the harmonics that give guitars their unique sound. It’s a pretty neat hack, but don’t forget that he is dealing with quite a lot of juice: if you were to inadvertantly touch the string and ground it to earth, there is enough current in the circuit to kill you.

Yeah, [Josh’s] hack is all about the right hand rule,
I know that he’s no hacking fool,
you’ve got my E string resonating, resonating so fine
just don’t touch it, or you’ll end your time
Help me, yeah, Purple Haze!

(with apologies to the ghost of [Jimi Hendrix], guitar hacker supreme)

Filed under: musical hacks