Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Kick ass idea

I just had this bad ass idea for a guitar.  For those who don't know much about guitar, sorry it may be confusing.  I've been playing a lot of guitar lately and not just the kind where I look up songs online to impress girls and learn the tabs, but I've actually been learning the in's and out's of a guitar and its frets.
Anyways, I have this idea and I think it would be amazing if I could somehow make it.  One day, I will.

Ok, so this is my idea.  I think that there should be a fretless guitar, and instead where you'd find the indicators of which fret it is (the little white dots) the entire thing would just be one entire long scene of images, in a way like Ancient Egypt's hieroglyphics.  It's hard to put into words what I'm imaging... but just picture the guitar neck without any frets or fret indicators and all up and down the neck there were just images everywhere.  Not for every fret, but just an entire array of different images, maybe depicting something important (to you) or maybe just a bunch of different images you want.

Now here's where it gets (mildly) interesting.  There are some important points on the fretboard of a guitar, such as G on the low E string, or the 12th fret of every E string (indicating an octave) and so on and so forth.  Now without frets or fret indicators, that would be hard to imagine where these notes are (although violinists do it all the time).  What I think instead, is that with the hieroglyph of images, these manuscripts of images parading up the neck of your guitar, I think that certain points of the images should indicate important points of your guitar.  They  can be whatever part of the image you choose for them to be.

For example... let's say you have your guitar depict your life.  In every scene, let's say your hand, wherever it is, indicates a G.  So if you ever were looking for a G, just look for your hard in the images.  Etc etc... there's so many ways you can do this, such as a 5th above whatever note you were playing could be a star, or the eye of a snake, or the hilt of a sword.  So more than the images just being aesthetically pleasing and customized just for you, they could also be pragmatic and useful, giving them utility.

This is my idea, please don't steal it.  If you're going to use it, at least ask me first for permission.

1 comment:

  1. Very interesting concept.

    As a fretless guitarist I do tend to find the notes more by intuition, I guess like a violinist, but the decoration idea does hold merit, providing the images do not interfere with the sustain of the notes.

    You could look at how Harry Partch did it in 1949...

    http://unfretted.com/loader.php?LINK=/gallery/vintage_fretless

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