Up all night was: guitar synth

[Harry Bissell]

Some times I get a stuffy nose (eh...) and the medication can have some
bizarre side effects. If I have to take it for the first time, late at
night... I will not sleep. So I lie awake
in bed ALL NIGHT LONG, waiting for the effects to go away.

(I know you college kids and '60s refugees actually LIKE this kind of
thing...) but if its a SUNDAY night with work in the AM its no fun...

OTOH: with nothing moving except the brain, you can get a lot of
engineering done. Here
are the fever dreams from the weekend.

GUITAR SYNTH:  Premise... If you knew precisely what fret is fingered,
you can take
a damn good guess at what the pitch will be. Maybe not perfect, but it
will cover you until you can make a real measurement "later".

Idea #1 :  Some guitar has "glued on" stainless steel frets, no tang.
Think its "Parker".
Use this fret construction, with a piezo strip under each fret. Whack
the piezos with a voltage pulse, transmits a mechanical impulse. Now
scan fron the nut toward the bridge,
wacking each fret in turn. Piezo saddles in the bridge form the
receiver. Now if the fret is behind the finger, the pulse cannot
transmit down the string... (mechanical damping) but as soon as a fret
just in FRONT of the finger is hit, the pulse races to the bridge saddle
pickup a 4000 feet per second (speed of sound in steel, I think..) That
is the finger position.

Works with Barre chords, etc. Pre-bent strings are still a problem. You
don't have to
enable the output until a magnetic "hex" pickup gets the pick attack.

Problem... can the wacked string generate enough mechanical vibration to
be seen as
audio in the pickup ???

Would the fret vibration tickle ??? HURT ???

Idea #2   (now 4:00am)  Implant tiny pickup coils in the neck, one per
fret/string in the middle of the fingerboard between each fret, right
under the string.  When a string is plucked, the coil nearest the nut
that gets an output is just in front of the finger position.
No need to get the pitch from this coil, just amplitude.

Problems... mighty complex ain't it ??? but with todays "rare earth"
magnets it should be possible. You could make a test unit from 20 G-Vox
pickups (the string spacing would be a little wide...) That's only $1000
in coils.... (LOL)

Idea #3  (possibly stupid...)  Use the "resistive fret" idea, and a 12
string guitar. Sense up the adjacent string pairs ??? Well I said it was
stupid...

OK Amigos... someone tell me that YOUR company makes just the piezos I
need for
2 bucks (whatever currency....?) each. Or you have a new breakthrough
capacitive sensor that would make the fretboard sensors a simple SMT
job....

Or YOU STAY UP ALL NIGHT AND COME UP WITH A BETTER IDEA.

I'm waiting... but I won't wait up all night (this time....)

H^)