Prototype of the prototype

Rocco Wallis 23rd November 202223rd November 2022 0 Comments

Before making the final prototype, I wanted to attempt making a functional single string.

A spare piece of wood, I drilled two holes, with a tuning peg in one and the other for the string to rest.

The motor I made previously attached to play the string. Also, to note, I made a makeshift bridge as this was needed to have the string be the correct height, and a second one is later placed next to the peg.

I placed this on an acoustic guitar to test how the acoustics would affect it. When doing this, the string and sound produced were much louder, even if it was obvious. I have spoken about using sympathetic strings to increase the resonance, and here I really heard them working.

Here I put small rails on the side so the slider could rest on top. While this did work, a routed material would work more effectively as it couldn’t fall out.

This prototype in use

After making this, I found two issues. The first was with the motors, and the second was with the slider.

The motor had two main faults, firstly being too loud, so loud you couldn’t hear the rest. Along with this, it didn’t have enough torque to work at lower speeds. I plan on getting slower motors with higher rpm (around 6000 instead of 10000 here). For the noise, I could get brushless motors, which are extremely quiet but are more expensive, or different motors that are more designed to be quiet. Or I could bypass this completely and use pickups for the strings, the only issue is the motors will be picked up as they have a magnetic field.

For the slider, I think an encapsulated rail would work better and allow it to stay in place without going anywhere. For the final prototype, I will use PVC pipe to essentially recreate this.

Rocco’s blog

Prototype of the prototype

Leave a Reply Cancel reply