Neat - take three

[michiexile]

Optical bass guitar
Originally uploaded by michiexile

For thette, who asked for photos portraying neat. Here in the semantic space of "DAMN, that's cool!"

It's actually quite marvelously good. They take a laser, and point it at a photocell. The photocell gets hooked straight into the line-in of an amplifier. Then they place a taut black rubber cord just next to the light beam. By fingering the string, you get the string vibrating at various frequencies, and thus it breaks the lightbeam in corresponding intervals, resulting in a Really Phat bass guitar sound coming out of the speakers.

Using your fingers, you can play percussion on the light beam.

And using a fine-toothed comb, you can sc-sc-sc-sc-sc-scratch.

You're still invited to submit ideas for the photo meme, although I don't promise to get to them right away.

Please do comment on what you think of this pic or any others in the photo meme entries.

Comments

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

That's very very cool. I saw something a bit like that at a Dorkbot-alba meeting a couple of years ago, though they hadn't embedded it into a guitar body.

You can apparently get laser harps as well :-)