rjgoos
12th November 2004, 12.12 am
Well, for better OR for worse...
I strung the homebrew unit up, laying on the workbench...pickup literally wired the pickup to a chord with alligator clips, into a pedal to increase the volume, into an old cassette recorder...totally unshielded, and recorded a few minutes of random stuff.
I then fed the audio output of the cassette recorder into my wife's Mac, and digitized it, selected one minute, and made an MP3. By any definition...a pretty sub-optimum recording studio.
Other caveats:
1. Remember, it was laying down on the workbench, I was trying to tap it laying flat like steel guitar. There are mistakes, you were warned...
2. The pickup was the absolute cheapest one available on the planet...something like $9.50 from guitarpartsusa.com
So, with all of that said, here is a 1 minute MP3 of the first sounds from my prototype tap guitar:
http://members.ifmcs.net/rjgoos/Public/Music/Homemade/first-sounds.mp3
OK, OK...it's ugly, and maybe doesn't sound that great, but at least I have a prototype!!! Consider the gauntlet thrown down...who on tappistry.org will be next???
Jay
Notes about the instrument:
1. All-metal construction, except for the nut.
2. 24" scale, six strings, three melody strings in 4ths, three 'bass' strings in inverted 5ths. Imagine a Stick in classic tuning, with strings 3-4-5 and 7-8-9, capo'ed at about fret 7 or so. The strings were old Stick strings.
3. The only specialty items were the tuning gears and pickup, the rest was just bulk metal from a local hardware store. Less than $20 in metal, $10 for the pickup, $25 for tuning gears.
I strung the homebrew unit up, laying on the workbench...pickup literally wired the pickup to a chord with alligator clips, into a pedal to increase the volume, into an old cassette recorder...totally unshielded, and recorded a few minutes of random stuff.
I then fed the audio output of the cassette recorder into my wife's Mac, and digitized it, selected one minute, and made an MP3. By any definition...a pretty sub-optimum recording studio.
Other caveats:
1. Remember, it was laying down on the workbench, I was trying to tap it laying flat like steel guitar. There are mistakes, you were warned...
2. The pickup was the absolute cheapest one available on the planet...something like $9.50 from guitarpartsusa.com
So, with all of that said, here is a 1 minute MP3 of the first sounds from my prototype tap guitar:
http://members.ifmcs.net/rjgoos/Public/Music/Homemade/first-sounds.mp3
OK, OK...it's ugly, and maybe doesn't sound that great, but at least I have a prototype!!! Consider the gauntlet thrown down...who on tappistry.org will be next???
Jay
Notes about the instrument:
1. All-metal construction, except for the nut.
2. 24" scale, six strings, three melody strings in 4ths, three 'bass' strings in inverted 5ths. Imagine a Stick in classic tuning, with strings 3-4-5 and 7-8-9, capo'ed at about fret 7 or so. The strings were old Stick strings.
3. The only specialty items were the tuning gears and pickup, the rest was just bulk metal from a local hardware store. Less than $20 in metal, $10 for the pickup, $25 for tuning gears.