Optical Pickups / Experience Music Project

[wmlusk]

My dad was in town for Thanksgiving and he and I spent a fun day at the Experience Music Project (EMP) on Monday. One of my favorite parts of EMP is the guitar gallery where you can walk through the evolution of the modern six-string, bass, and *new* instruments. Alas, they have no dedicated tapping instruments on display despite the efforts of Dave Bunker and others.

One cool thing they have is a Zon Sonus Bass with sound clips by Tappistry.Org member Michael Manring. The Sonus is an innovative bass that has optical pickups housed in the bridge instead of piezo or magnetic pickups. The sound was fantastic and Michael’s playing was (of course) amazing.

Does anybody know if Zon or others are still experimenting with optical pickups these days?

[Uberbass]

Billy - I too have seen the ZON thing at EMP...nice.

I believe there are several bass manufacturers offing the Lightwave optical pick ups as an option. They include: MTD, Conklin, F bass, Zon and I'm sure a bunch of others.

I don't know of an optical pick up system other than the Lightwave one.

b

[traktor]

Well, of course, the Mobius MidiTapper comes with the Photon-Midi pickup, which is an optical pickup. However, in its present incarnation it is hex-output (a pickup on each string), used to drive the Roland VG88 V-Guitar system, or the Roland GR33 synth.

No doubt you will now go hog wild wanting to know more about the MidiTapper, no doubt. In that case, please see the newest online newsletter, now available at --

http://www.megatar.com/documents/

There you'll find an audio article (in MP3 or Real Audio) of Ricky Wade demonstrating touchstyle technique on the MidiTapper.

(I know this wasn't really exactly what you meant, but I could not help myself.)

[wmlusk]

Nice commercial :)

Now back to our program - I found this article on the Lightwave (thanks Uberbass, I couldn't remember the name) http://namm.harmony-central.com/SNAMM00/Content/Lightwave_Systems/PR/Open-Arch.html.

I wonder what a Stick, Warr, Megatar, etc... would sound like with one of those?

[traktor]

Some many months ago, maybe two years, I spoke with the folks at Lightwave. At that time they only had a monolithic unit, and the most strings it could handle was five.

However, I think the current crop will now work on six-string guitars, so it should be doable on a tapping instrument. I'm curious and would like to try it, but feel certain that I'll not have time for the project for a long time. This would be a great do it yourselfer project for somebody though. If anybody builds one, I would love to hear it.