Music

Concept guitar blends string picking with Pi-powered synthesis

Concept guitar blends string picking with Pi-powered synthesis
The Spirit Animal concept from Lucem Custom Instruments and Tracktion Corporation
The Spirit Animal concept from Lucem Custom Instruments and Tracktion Corporation
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The BioTek 2 software synth runs on a Raspberry Pi housed inside the hollowed out body of the Spirit Animal concept
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The BioTek 2 software synth runs on a Raspberry Pi housed inside the hollowed out body of the Spirit Animal concept
All of the instrument's combined sounds are output from the guitar jack to the front of the Spirit Animal's body
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All of the instrument's combined sounds are output from the guitar jack to the front of the Spirit Animal's body
Players control the BioTek 2 software synth using an X/Y pad displayed on a 5 inch touchpad behind the bridge of the Spirit Animal concept
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Players control the BioTek 2 software synth using an X/Y pad displayed on a 5 inch touchpad behind the bridge of the Spirit Animal concept
The 5 inch touchscreen running the BioTek 2 interface is angled slightly towards the Spirit Animal concept's player
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The 5 inch touchscreen running the BioTek 2 interface is angled slightly towards the Spirit Animal concept's player
Close up of the BioTek 2 synth interface running on a 5 inch touchscreen mounted behind the bridge of the Spirit Animal concept
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Close up of the BioTek 2 synth interface running on a 5 inch touchscreen mounted behind the bridge of the Spirit Animal concept
The Spirit Animal from Lucem Custom Instruments in collaboration with Seattle's Tracktion Corporation debuts at NAMM 2019 in Anaheim, California
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The Spirit Animal from Lucem Custom Instruments in collaboration with Seattle's Tracktion Corporation debuts at NAMM 2019 in Anaheim, California
The Spirit Animal concept from Lucem Custom Instruments and Tracktion Corporation
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The Spirit Animal concept from Lucem Custom Instruments and Tracktion Corporation
View gallery - 7 images

Merging synthesized sounds with rocking riffs on a guitar might involve installing a MIDI pickup, or plugging into a stomp box or blending the two in post production. Now the UK's Lucem Custom Instruments has collaborated with Seattle's Tracktion Corporation for an interesting concept guitar that has a BioTek 2 synthesizer built in.

The Spirit Animal has a BioTek 2 software synth X/Y pad displayed on a 5 inch touchscreen mounted behind the hardtail bridge of the twin humbucker double-cut guitar, angled slightly up towards the player. The BioTek 2 is a virtual sampling and synthesis design playground that comes with over 500 patches created by Richard Devine and Christian Halten and would normally require a laptop running digital audio workstation software.

But the Lucem concept rocks a Raspberry Pi computer inside the hollowed out body to provide all of the processing power needed to support the synthesis engine, and you can actually see some of the electronics through the cutout that arches above the bridge.

Players control the BioTek 2 software synth using an X/Y pad displayed on a 5 inch touchpad behind the bridge of the Spirit Animal concept
Players control the BioTek 2 software synth using an X/Y pad displayed on a 5 inch touchpad behind the bridge of the Spirit Animal concept

Elsewhere, the guitar features a 22-fret rosewood fingerboard with dot inlays, chrome 3x3 tuners, a three-way pickup selector and five volume/tone dials.

The signal from both the cooked-in synth and the guitar's pickups can be blended using the pan pot and the whole shebang is output via the instrument jack to the front of the body. There are two ports on the bottom edge of the body, one is USB for charging the Li-ion battery and the other is Ethernet for connectivity/screen sharing.

The Spirit Animal is purely a concept design study at this stage and no further details have been revealed ahead of a NAMM 2019 debut later this week in Anaheim, California.

Source: Lucem Custom Instruments

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