MOTM

In a message dated 3/24/2000 8:04:45 PM, goku@... writes:

>Hey, didn't someone else make a wired neck controller? Roland? Guitorgan?

Hi Terry,

Thanks for the info about the DG-20, it might make an interesting alternative 
controller, if not a real guitar controller.

"Guitorgan?" you ask? Yes, the Guitorgan! In that instrument, Vox was able to 
(through Herculean engineering feats) combine everything good about their 
organs with everything that was good about their guitars(???) ..... and throw 
them all away, leaving them out of this instrument entirely. 

When I was in high school, a friend of mine had inherited one from his 
grandfather. He loaned it to me for several months in 74 or 75. It looked 
pretty cool with buttons and knobs all over it, and had that classic Vox mod 
sixties shape. It was almost as light as two Les Paul Customs, and had wires 
going through the neck for each note (I'd guess over a hundred) of the 
fingerboard. So it had a neck that was almost as quick as a finely crafted 
2'X4". 

Since the string touching the fret closed the circuit which produced the 
appropriate (at least theoretically) pitch for that note, each "fret" had to 
be electrically separated so that adjacent strings would close different 
circuits. As such, Vox (brilliantly!) decided to just make a little channel 
in each fret between the strings. Oh sure, there might be a little problem if 
one were to say "bend the strings across the fret" in that the note would 
suddenly bottom out in that channel dying away entirely, but who'd do that 
anyway! And one needs to make sacrifices if one is to go boldly into the 
unexplored realms now possible with this instrument. And when you think about 
it, how important was bending strings to guitar players in say 1968 when 
these instruments were produced?

Now the bad news, unfortunately the guy who'd installed the oscillators, may 
have had a bit too many on lunch hour -- if you know what I mean. So I found 
that the D string had a much lower range than the low E string. I found that 
I couldn't tune it to any open or standard (raised or lowered) tunings 
because the ratios were all screwed up between the oscillators.

But other than that, it was a fine instrument. Clearly, it was the marketing 
department that screwed up this instrument's chances of acceptance by a 
hungry guitar playing population awaiting everything such an instrument could 
deliver.

Now, why again did ARP go under?
JB