Manlio Rules

http://misadigital.com/index.html

My obsession in life is to have a midi guitar. There, I said it. I have always been obsessed with using my chosen musical platform (guitar) to make sounds commonly not found with guitars (pads, horns, violins). Waaay back in 2001 I owned a roland divided pickup for my fender strat, along with the accoutrements needed to play. It wasn’t a bad tool but it had a few annoying habits, most commonly triggering notes that i didn’t play. I will admit to being a “loose” guitar player (sloppy) so it’s not uncommon for me to hit strings i don’t mean. on the guitar this isn’t a huge deal since i can instantly mute them, but the roland would still trigger those notes, often quite loudly. This was not ideal

In a case of really terrible timing, i sold this guitar right before I started graduate school, where i spent my first year learning… wait for it… all about midi software! brilliant. My first semester of my second year i actually went so far as to BUILD a midi guitar. It was called “midi guitar”. it had about 20 buttons, a few knobs, and it caught on fire one time during the ITP show. Also, Vernon Davis from Living Colour played it! But i don’t think he liked it very much.

About a year ago i bought a yamaha ez-eg “teaching” guitar which also happens to function as a midi guitar. on the plus side, it was very affordable ($300). On the minus side, the damn thing just loves to play notes. All the time! Right notes, wrong notes, any notes it can think of. It can’t get enough of triggering notes. So i started using it less and less, since i found that even my stupid fingers could play a keyboard with more reliability than this thing.

But now, now we have something. This guy in sydney has apparently built a touch screen midi guitar that’s also a linux computer. I don’t know how much it’s going to cost, but my price willingness for such a thing is embarrassingly high.

And yes, i realize that if i had just spent the last 7 years learning keyboards I wouldn’t be having this problem.