An Instrument That I Want to Make

I’ve been playing my guitars on my lap using a slide a lot more. It’s fantastic. I make some truly disgusting sounds. As I’m playing, I noticed that how I interface with the guitar in this configuration, reminds me a lot of how I interact with Ableton’s Granulator.

With the Granulator, I move a cursor side to side across a digital audio buffer in order to launch the grains at the cursor’s specific point in time. With the slide guitar, I move the slide horizontally to control pitch, and by moving the slide up and down across the strings, I can control which strings are being impacted by the slide.

I’ve also been curious about hexaphonic guitar pickups ever since I saw the famous Spencer Seim Pedals & Effects Video. If hexaphonic pickups make it easy to filter and track the pitch of each string in real-time, we can use each string’s pitch as a control value for a separate grain in a granulator.

The effect of these two aspects combined, is the ability to “play” a granulator with the same degree that professional musicians play the slide guitar. A player could load in presets of samples and even play with a live band.

We could even add fiducial markers to the lap guitar, and display live graphics regarding the internal state of the granulators in real time using a hardware system similar to folk computer.