MIDI-guitar (was: Touch Switches/TS instruments )

[Ingo Debus]

Tom May wrote:
> Any resistive solution will require the player to wear non-conductive
> gloves on both hands unless you think it's cool to vary the pitch with
> playing pressure, sweat, right-hand damping, etc.  Sounds like it's
> bordering on the theremin in terms of playability.

The thinnest Konstantan (sp?) wire I can get here (0.06 mm diameter; I
doubt this could be used as a string) has 170 ohms per meter. A guitar
string is about 0.63 meters long. The resistance of the human skin is
much higher, so I don't think this would be much of a problem. I'd guess
some dirt etc. on the string or fret making a few additional ohms at the
contact place would cause much more trouble. The distance between frets
(at 12th fret) is about 17 mm, with 170 ohms/m this is less than 3 ohms!
The Trautonium uses a wire wound string to get a higher string
resistance, perhaps that's a solution.
I didn't mean to derive a pitch control voltage directly from the string
resistance,  this resistance is just to determine at which fret the
string is fingered, i.e. there have to be thresholds in the detection
circuit. (If one wanted a V/octave control voltage derived directly from the
string resistance the frets would have to be equally spaced, this would
be unconvenient for most guitarists).

But I remember a picture of the bassist of the German band "The Can"
wearing a glove on the left hand. Maybe this was the reason?

Ingo